pr.'" 


li^:;.:- 


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Ufrrtm  tljj  Sltbrary  of 

Ipqu^atljpJi  by  lyim  tn 

tl|p  ICtbrarij  of 

Pnnrrton  ^ti^nlogtral  S>fmtnar^ 

BX  5937  .T54^6  1890 
Thompson,  Hugh  Miller,  1830- 

1902. 
The  world  and  the  man 


THE  BALDWIN  LECTURES. 
I. 

Institutes  of  Christian  History  :  An  Introduction  to  His- 
toric Reading  and  Study.  By  A.  Cleveland  Coxe,  Bishop 
of  Western  New   York.      i2mo,  $1.50. 

II. 

Witnesses  to  Christ  :  A  Contribution  to  Christian  Apolo- 
getics.    By  William  Clark,   M.A.     i2mo,  fi.50. 

III. 

The  Church's  Certain  Faith.  By  Geo.  Zabriskie  Gray, 
D.D.      i2mo,  $1.50. 

IV. 

The  World  and  the  Man.  By  Hugh  Miller  Thompson, 
Bis Jiop  of  Mississippi.      i2mo,  $1.25. 


^ItK  galitiwlw  gcctuKCB,  X890 


'vi.'^' 


THE 

World  and  the  Man 


BY 


HUGH   MILLER   THOMPSON. 


NEW  YORK 
THOMAS     WHITTAKER 

2    AND    3    BIBLE    HOUSE 
1890 


Copyright,  1890, 

BY 

THOMAS    WHITTAKER 


ELECTROTYPED  AND   PRINTED   BY 

THE   publishers'    PRINTING   COMPANY 

30  &   32   WEST  13TH   STREET 

NEW    YORK 


D.  D.  D. 

THESE 
TO   THE    DEAR    AND    NOBLE 

MEMORY 

OF 

CHARLES     AUGUSTUS    WHITNEY 

NEW    ORLEANS. 

PASSED    TO   THE    SPIRITUAL    CITY 

OCTOBER    29,    1SS2. 


EXTRACT  FROM  THE  DEED  OF  TRUST, 

IN     ACCORDANCE     WITH     THE     PROVISIONS     OF     WHICH     THE 
BALDWIN    LECTURES    WERE   INSTITUTED. 

"  This  Instrument,  made  and  executed  between 
Samuel  Smith  Harris,  Bishop  of  the  Protestant  Epis- 
copal Church  in  the  Diocese  of  Michigan,  as  party  of 
the  first  part,  and  Henry  P.  Baldwin,  Alonzo  B. 
Palmer,  Henry  A.  Hayden,  Sidney  D.  Miller  and 
Henry  P.  Baldwin,  2d,  of  the  State  of  Michigan, 
Trustees  under  the  trust  created  by  this  instrument, 
as  parties  of  the  second  part,  witnesseth  as  follows: 

"  In  the  year  of  our  Lord  one  thousand  eight  hun- 
dred and  eighty-five,  the  said  party  of  the  first  part, 
moved  by  the  importance  of  bringing  all  practicable 
Christian  influences  to  bear  upon  the  great  body  of 
students  annually  assembled  at  the  University  of 
Michigan,  undertook  to  promote  and  set  in  operation 
a  plan  of  Christian  work  at  said  University,  and  col- 
lected contributions  for  that  purpose,  of  which  plan 
the  following  outline  is  here  given,  that  is  to  say: 

"  I.  To  erect  a  building  or  hall  near  the  Uni- 
versity, in  which  there  should  be  cheerful  parlors,  a 
well-equipped  reading-room,  and  a  lecture-room 
where  the  lectures  hereinafter  mentioned  might  be 
given; 

"  2.  To  endow  a  lectureship  similar  to  the 
Bampton  Lectureship  in  England,  for  the  establish- 
ment and  defence  of  Christian  truth:  the  lectures  on 


6         EXTRACT  FROM   THE   DEED   OF    TRUST. 

such  foundation  to  be  delivered  annually  at  Ann 
Arbor  by  a  learned  clergyman  or  other  communicant 
of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  to  be  chosen  as 
hereinafter  provided  :  such  lectures  to  be  not  Jess 
than  six,  nor  more  than  eight  in  number,  and  to  be 
published  in  book  form  before  the  income  of  the  fund 
shall  be  paid  to  the  lecturer; 

"  3.  'i"o  endow  two  other  lectureships,  one  on 
Biblical  Literature  and  Learning,  and  the  other  on 
Christian  Evidences;  the  object  of  such  lectureships 
to  be  to  provide  for  all  the  students  who  may  be 
willing  to  avail  themselves  of  them,  a  complete  course 
of  instruction  in  sacred  learning,  and  in  the  philosophy 
of  right  thinking  and  right  living,  without  which  no 
education  can  justly  be  considered  complete; 

"  4.  To  organize  a  society,  to  be  composed  of  the 
students  in  all  classes  and  departments  of  the  Uni- 
versity who  may  be  members  of,  or  attached  to,  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  of  which  society  the 
Bishop  of  the  Diocese,  the  Rector,  Wardens,  and 
Vestrymen  of  St.  Andrew's  Parish,  and  all  the  Pro- 
fessors of  the  University  who  are  communicants  of  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church  should  be  members 
ex  officio,  which  society  should  have  the  care  and 
management  of  the  reading-room  and  lecture-room 
of  the  hall,  and  of  all  exercises  or  employments  carried 
on  therein,  and  should  moreover  annually  elect  each 
of  the  lecturers  hereinbefore  mentioned,  upon  the 
nomination  of  the  Bishop  of  the  Diocese. 

"  In  pursuance  of  the  said  plan,  the  said  society  of 
students  and  others  has  been  duly  organized  under 
the  name  of  the  '  Hobart  Guild  of  the  University  of 
Michigan  ';  the   hall  above  mentioned  has  been  built 


EXTRACT  FROM   THE  DEED    OF    TRUST.         7 

and  called  'Hobart  Hall';  and  Mr.  Henry  P.  Baldwin, 
of  Detroit,  Mich.,  aiid  Sibyl  A.  Baldwin,  his  wife, 
have  given  to  the  said  party  of  the  first  part  the  sum 
of  ten  thousand  dollars  for  the  endowment  and  sup- 
port of  the  lectureship  first  hereinbefore   mentioned. 

"  Now,  therefore,  I,  the  said  Samuel  Smith  Harris, 
Bishop  as  aforesaid,  do  hereby  give,  grant,  and  trans- 
fer to  the  said  Henry  P.  Baldwin,  Alonzo  B.  Palmer, 
Henry  A.  Hayden,  Sidney  D.  Miller,  and  Henry  P. 
Baldwin  2d,  Trustees  as  aforesaid,  the  said  sum  of 
ten  thousand  dollars  to  be  invested  in  good  and  safe 
interest-bearing  securities,  the  net  income  thereof  to 
be  held  in  trust  for  the  following  uses: 

**  I.  The  said  fund  shall  be  known  as  the  Endow- 
ment Fund  of  the  Baldwin  lectures. 

"  2.  There  shall  be  chosen  annually  by  the  Hobart 
Guild  of  the  University  of  Michigan,  upon  the  nomina- 
tion of  the  Bishop  of  Michigan,  a  learned  clergyman 
or  other  communicant  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church,  to  deliver  at  Ann  Arbor,  and  under  the 
auspices  of  the  said  Hobart  Guild,  between  the  Feast 
of  St.  Michael  and  All  Angels  and  the  Feast  of  St. 
Thomas,  in  each  year,  not  less  than  six  nor  more 
than  eight  lectures,  for  the  Establishment  and  Defence 
of  Christian  Truth  ;  the  said  lectures  to  be  published 
in  book  form  by  Easter  of  the  following  year,  and  to 
be  entitled  '  The  Baldwin  Lectures';  and  there  shall 
be  paid  to  the  said  lecturer  the  income  of  the  said 
endowment  fund,  upon  the  delivery  of  fifty  copies  of 
said  lectures  to  the  said  Trustees  or  their  successors  ; 
the  said  printed  volumes  to  contain,  as  an  extract  from 
this  instrument,  or  in  condensed  form,  a  statement  of 
the  object  and  conditions  of  this  trust." 


PREFATORY   NOTE. 


The  undersigned  prints  these  Lectures  because  it  is 
a  necessity  of  the  condition. 

That  they  may  not,  by  some  possible  readers,  be 
misunderstood,  he  would  say — 

He  beheves  very  strongly  in  Human  Nature;  espe- 
cially in  the  Aryan  Race,  and  his  own  branch  of  it;  in 
"Heredity;"  in  the  United  States  of  America;  but 
before  all,  and  beyond  all,  he  believes  in  Almighty 
God,  the  Father  of  Men,  in  the  Catholic  Faith,  as 
declared  in  the  Nicene  and  Athanasian  Creeds  and 
herein,  in  Joshua  Ben  Miriam,  Who  was  born  in  the 
little  town  of  Bethlehem,  in  Syria,  1895  years  ago  last 
25th  of  December — 

'  The  First  true  Gentleman  that  ever  breathed  " — 
believes  in  Him  as  the  only  God  about  whom  he,  or 
any  man  knows,  or  can  know,  anything,  and  as  the 
Man  who  is  his  ideal  of  all  Manliness,  Kingliness, 
Courtesy  and  Valour,  at  whose  feet — God  and  Man — 
One  Person  forever  indissoluble,  he  bows  in  an  adora- 
tion, of  which  Prayers  and  Sacraments  are  only  a 
faint  expression. 

In  a  great  deal  which  calls  itself  "  The  Evangelical 
Scheme  of  Salvation  "  it  will  be  seen  he  does  not  be- 
lieve.   Indeed  it  is,  as  presented  commonly,  supremely 


I  o  PREFA  TOR  V  NO  TE. 

offensive  to  him,  in  its  mean,  sordid,  and  cowardly 
desire  to  get  its  poor  little  beggarly  soul,  what  it  calls, 
"  saved. " 

To  him,  his  Lord's  Mission  appears  to  have  been  to 
teach  and  help  men  to  make  their  souls  worth  saving. — 
He  does  not  think  the  Gospel  a  contrivance  for  dodg- 
ing Hell  ! 

He  is  very  sure  that  if  a  man  deserves  Hell,  Hell  is 
the  best  place  for  him,  and,  in  any  case,  he  will  go 
there  by  the  merciful  ordering  of  a  merciful  God  ! — 
And  all  the  world  will  return  thanks! 

If  there  seem  to  be  in  this,  or  anything  else, 
"  Unorthodoxy  "  the  writer  wishes  to  say  he  is  strictly 
"  Orthodox,"  in  the'  only  true  sense  of  that  word.  He 
accepts,  and  holds  from  the  heart,  every  dogma  of  the 
undivided  Catholic  Church,  and  he  believes  these 
same  dogmas  to  be  the  sole  solutions  of  the  questions 
of  his  own  day  and  all  days — for  Catholic  dogmas  are 
living  principles,  seeds  of  things. 

He  desires  also  to  say  to  another  possible  kind  of 
readers,  that  he  has  tried  to  keep  up  with  the  advance 
of  what  is  called  "  scientific"  knowledge  in  his  day, 
and,  as  far  as  a  busy  and  anxious  life  on  other  lines 
would  allow,  humbly  believes  he  has  succeeded.  He 
accepts,  of  course,  gladly,  every  step  that  knowledge 
gains,  and  holds  that  a  Christianity  which  cannot  do 
the  same,  needs  very  much  to  take  stock  of  itself  and 
see  what  it  amounts  to  as  a  Religion  or  even  a  bit  of 
Common  Sense. 

But  he  ought  also  to  say,  knowing  how  little 
"  science  "  knows,  and  how  irrational  and  absurd  much 
of  it  is,  from  day  to  day — (the  present  theories  of 
light  and  heat  for  instance)  that  he  does  by  no  means 


PREFATORY  NOTE.  II 

admire  a  certain  "  puppyism  "  noticeable  and  offensive 
in  some  otherwise  amiable  "  scientific  "  gentlemen, 
who,  having  measured  the  length  of  the  fore  legs  of  a 
newly  discovered  species  of  beetle  accurately,  insist  that 
they  must  thereupon  be  granted  a  patent  right  on  the 
making  of  a  Universe! 

He,  of  course,  philosophically  recognizes  "  the 
natural  development"  of  this  puppyism  from  "  the 
environment,"  but  also  thankfully  reposes  on  the 
scientific  fact  that  in  the  usual  nine  days  the  puppy, 
subject  to  its  conditions,  gets  its  eyes  open. 

And  finally,  because  he  believes  in  God,  he  believes 
also  in  man  (he  worships  a  Man).  But,  as  a  result,  he 
believes  in  his  own  Race  as  the  highest  development  of 
Man  yet  on  Earth,  and  as  bound,  therefore,  to  rule, 
order,  control  and  direct,  most  kindly  but  most  firmly, 
all  peoples  not  so  developed  with  which  it  comes  in 
contact. — The  big  brother  ought  to  help  and  direct  the 
little  brother — sometimes,  perhaps,  box  the  little  fel- 
low's ears  !  Who  knows? 

He  does  not  believe  in  the  Gallic,  infidel,  unscientific 
lie  which  Thomas  Jefferson  put,  like  a  fly  in  amber, 
into  the  "  Declaration  of  Independence."  Men  are 
not  "  created  equal,"  and  no  men  and  no  people  have 
any  ^^rights"  which  they  have  not  earned. 

Finally  he  believes  in  a  world  redeemed,  in  the 
Victory  of  Good  here  on  this  Earth,  in  a  world  where 
murderers  shall  be  hanged  or  "electrocised,"  thieves 
put  in  jail,  "politicians"  banished,  and  "statesmen," 
of  the  present  American  type,  be  sent  to  fit  idiotic,  or 
other  asylums  for  imbeciles  or  knaves,  for  life. 

He  believes  the  time  is  coming  when  men  shall  be 
absolute    lords   and    masters   of    Nature   and  all  her 


12  PREFATORY  NOTE. 

powers,  as  was  the  one  Man  who  is  the  type  revelation 
and  reaUty  of  what  God  means,  when  the  Eternal 
Word  says,  "  Son  of  Man."  For  that  survival  of  the 
fittest  he  is  thankful  to  believe,  all  powers,  visible 
and  invisible,  are  inexorably  working  ! 

Hugh  Miller  Thompson. 

Battle  Hill,  Mississippi,  March  31st,  1890. 


CONTENTS. 


4.ECTURE  PAGE 

I.     The  Outlook, .  17 

II.     Led  Up,        . 47 

III.  Tempted, 81 

IV.  Bread, 121 

V.     Kingdoms, 155 

VI.     The  Law  of  the  Case, 197 

VII.     The  End, 237 


1  Then  was  Jesus  led  up  of  the  Spirit  into  the  wilderness  to  be 
tempted  of  the  devil. 

2  And  when  he  had  fasted  forty  days  and  forty  nights,  he  was 
afterward  an  hungered. 

3  And  when  the  tempter  came  to  him,  he  said,  If  thou  be  the 
Son  of  God,  command  that  these  stones  be  made  bread. 

4  But  he  answered  and  said,  It  is  written,  Man  shall  not  live 
by  bread  alone,  but  by  every  word  that  proceedeth  out  of  the 
mouth  of  God. 

5  Then  the  devil  taketh  him  up  into  the  holy  city,  and  setteth 
him  on  a  pinnacle  of  the  temple, 

6  And  sailh  unto  him,  If  thou  be  the  Son  of  God,  cast  thyself 
down  ;  for  it  is  written.  He  shall  give  his  angels  charge  concern- 
ning  thee  ;  and  in  their  hands  they  shall  bear  thee  up,  lest  at  any 
time  thou  dash  thy  foot  against  a  stone. 

7  Jesus  said  unto  him,  It  is  written  again.  Thou  shalt  not 
tempt  the  Lord  thy  God. 

8  Again  the  devil  taketh  him  up  into  an  exceeding  high  moun- 
tain, and  sheweth  him  all  the  kingdoms  of  the  world,  and  the 
glory  of  them  ; 

g  And  saith  unto  him,  All  these  things  will  I  give  thee,  if  thou 
wilt  fall  down  and  worship  me. 

10  Then  saith  Jesus  unto  him,  Get  thee  hence,  Satan  :  for  it  is 
written,  Thou  shalt  worship  the  Lord  thy  God,  and  him  only 
shalt  thou  serve. 

11  Then  the  devil  Icavclh  him,  and,  behold,  angels  came  and 
ministered  unto  him. 

St.  I\Iatthew  s  Gospel,  Chap.  iv. 


LECTURE   I. 
THE  OUTLOOK^ 


' '  Men  that  had  understanding  of  the  times  to  know  what  Israel 
ought  to  do^ 

I  Chronicles  xii.  32. 


THE  WORLD  AND  THE   MAN. 


LECTURE   I. 
THE   OUTLOOK. 

THE  sun  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  fast 
going  down  the  western  sky,  and  the  fore- 
most races  of  the  world  are  asking,  of  the  Past, 
what  has  it  done  for  them  ?  and  of  the  Future, 
what  awaits  them  ? 

For  the  century  near  its  end  there  are  voices  of 
praise  and  voices  of  blame.  There  are  those  who 
tell  us  of  its  great  advance  in  material  knowl- 
edge, in  control  of  the  powers  of  nature,  its  turn- 
ing them  to  men's  uses,  its  victories  over  the  un- 
known. They  proclaim  the  abundant  products 
men  have  drawn  from  the  earth,  the  vast  treas- 
ures taken  from  the  valleys  and  hills,  the  secrets 
wrung  from  the  gray  deeps,  the  wisdom  learned 
amid  the  polar  ice,  and  the  trackless  spaces  that 
men  have  broug-ht  under  human  control. 


1 8  THE  OUTLOOK. 

They  speak  in  loftier  strains  of  the  broader 
reach  of  human  Hberty,  of  the  wider  understand- 
ing and  proclamation  of  human  rights,  of  the 
victories  for  freedom  of  speech  and  freedom  of 
thought,  and  of  man's  growing  dignity  upon  the 
earth. 

They  point  us  to  these.  They  say  the  nine- 
teenth century  shall  be  a  century  marked,  in  all 
coming  ages,  as  the  time  when  men  awoke  from 
the  darkness  of  ignorance  and  superstition,  and 
saw,  for  the  first  time  clearly,  the  dawn  of  the 
day  of  hope  and  victory  for  humanity. 

And  all  these  voices  are  true.  We  cannot 
speak  too  high  a  word  of  what  the  nineteenth 
century  has  done.  We  cannot  proclaim  too  mag- 
nificently the  victories  it  has  gained  for  man. 
We  cannot  be  too  thankful  that  we  have  been 
born  in  such  a  century,  trained  in  it,  made  a  part 
of  its  struggles  and  its  triumphs.  The  flower  of 
all  the  ages,  it  is  the  most  splendid  century  that 
has  rolled  out  of  the  darkness  of  the  unknown 
into  the  life  and  light  of  the  world  and  man. 

And  yet  there  are  other  voices,  voices  of  blame 
just  as  strong  as  the  voices  of  praise.  Men  say 
we  have  lost  our  old  reverences,  our  old  confi- 
dences, some  of  us  have  lost  our  old  faiths.  We 
have  lost  what  we   trusted  to,  what    our  fathers 


THE  OUTLOOK.  19 

believed  in.  High  and  blessed  things  have 
passed  out  of  our  skies  as  the  vision  of  a  dream. 
We  have  been  shaken  out  of  all  our  habitudes. 
We  know  no  longer  what  is  true  and  what  is 
false,  what  is  wisdom  and  what  is  folly.  All 
things  are  questioned.  All  things  are  tried. 
All  things  are  brought  into  the  arena  to  be  dis- 
puted. There  is  no  grace  in  old  reverence  by 
which  anything  may  justify  itself.  To-day  it 
must  vindicate  anew  its  right  to  be.  That  it  has 
stood  for  a  thousand  years  is  no  proof,  for  you 
or  me,  that  it  ought  to  stand  another  day.  Men 
ask  its  use,  and  we  must  cast  it  aside,  destroy  it, 
if  we  cannot  give  a  satisfactory  answer. 

And  there  are  other  voices  of  harsher  blame. 
Men  say  it  is  a  materialistic  age,  and  point  to 
these  various  victories  of  which  I  have  spoken  as 
an  evidence  of  its  materialism.  It  is  an  age  that 
has  lost  its  ideals.  The  heroic  days  have  gone. 
Men  are  struggling  only  for  temporary,  vulgar, 
material  success.  It  has  lost  the  old,  strong 
grasp  upon  things  eternal.  It  has  become  friv- 
olous. Its  questions  are  frivolous.  Its  aims  are 
shallow.  Men  are  working  for  the  things  of  an 
hour. 

So  men  blame  the  age  and  blame  it  as  truly, 
perhaps,  as  they  praise  it.     There  arc  these  two 


20  THE  OUTLOOK. 

sides  to  it,  and  both  sides,  I  think,  have  the  right 
to  be;  both  of  them  exist,  and  there  is  praise 
and  there  is  blame  with  equal  justice,  perhaps. 

And  yet  I  trust  that  we  here  can  say  of  the 
century  in  which  we  are  born  and  doing  our 
work  that  a  great  deal  of  the  blame,  like  a  great 
deal  of  the  praise,  is  very  shallow,  very  irrational. 

For,  do  you  know  I  am  rather  glad  I  live  in  a 
questioning  age  ?  I  am  rather  glad  that  things 
are  tested  and  tried,  that  men  reverence  the 
king's  crown  no  more,  that  they  reverence  the 
bishop's  mitre  no  longer;  and  it  seems  to  me  the 
age  is  nobly  right  in  that  it  counts  them  both 
baubles  unless  there  is  that  below  them  each 
that  justifies  the  kingliness  of  the  King  and  the 
Fatherhood  of  the  Bishop.  I  am  very  glad  that, 
in  my  day,  mere  symbols  of  things  count  for  so 
little  and  the  things  themselves  count  for  so 
much,  that  shadows  pass  away,  but  the  realities 
that  the  shadows  signify  are  stronger  and  more 
real  than  ever. 

We  want,  we  must  have,  the  power  of  leader- 
ship; we  want  guiding  and  controlling  men;  we 
want  the  power  of  intellect,  and  the  strong,  hon- 
est right  hand  to  lead,  to  teach  the  ignorant 
duty,  to  uphold  the  weak  and  control  the  strong. 
What  do  we  care  for  the  kinp-'s  crown  ?    We  want 


THE  OUTLOOK.  2i 

the  man  "  who  can  rule  and  dare  not  lie,"  crown 
or  no  crown!  What  do  we  care  for  a  bauble  of 
lace  and  satin,  we  want  the  leadership,  the 
fatherly  heart,  the  comforting  and  enlightening, 
the  lifting  up  and  sustaining  soul,  the  apostolic 
spirit  which  draws  men  upward  in  the  old  power 
of  its  beginning,  when  St,  Paul,  the  Prince  of 
Bishops,  felt  the  want — not  of  robes  and  mitre, 
but  of  the  old  cloak,  he  left  at  Troas! 

That  is  the  tone  of  the  age.  It  does  not  to  me 
sound  frivolous.  It  sounds  rather  thoroughly 
earnest,  real,  and  genuine. 

And  when  you  complain  again  that  the  age  has 
shaken  men's  faith,  I  say,  and  I  quote  the  old 
prophecy  for  that,  "  Yet  once  more  I  shake,  not 
the  Earth  only,  but  also  Heaven."  And  "  This 
word  signifieth  the  removal  of  those  things  that 
are  shaken  as  of  things  that  are  made,  that  those 
things  which  cannot  be  shaken  may  remain." 

There  are  things  that  ought  to  be  shaken, 
shaken  out  of  existence,  wiped  away,  and  the  age 
has  dared  to  do  that  and  has  dared  to  do  it,  in 
many  cases,  wisely  and  well,  and  in  God's  service 
and  man's.  Our  day  has  no  faith  in  formulas  as 
such.  Faith  in  the  realities  the  formulas  stood 
for  and  expressed !  It  cares  little  for  faith  in  a 
dusty    bundle    of    logical    statements,    called    a 


22  THE  OUTLOOK. 

"  Confession  of  Faith."  It  cares  a  great  deal  for 
a  faith  that  lives  and  works  and  helps  men  on 
and  cleans  out  the  world. 

I  should  be  very  far  from  calling  the  age  friv- 
olous, or  even  materialistic.  I  believe  it  to  be, 
on  the  other  hand,  the  most  serious  and  sadly 
earnest  age  that  the  earth  ever  saw.  I  believe  it 
to  be,  also  still  more,  at  heart,  and  when  its  dumb 
throes  find  speech,  a  thoroughly  religious  age. 
If  there  has  been  skepticism,  if  doubts  have  been 
evolved  and  cast  abroad  in  speech  and  writing, 
they  have  been  earnest  doubts,  serious  doubts. 
We  have  had  none  of  the  frivolous  unbelief  or 
frivolous  skepticism  of  the  last  century.  Where 
doubt  exists  in  the  nineteenth  century  it  is  deeply 
and  profoundly  earnest. 

If  I  should  characterize  the  age  at  all  I  should 
say  it  is  an  age  of  earnest,  weary  thought  and 
burdened  care,  an  age  most  profoundly  self- 
conscious,  almost  pitiful  to  me  in  its  self-con- 
sciousness. As  I  go  among  my  fellows,  meet 
them,  talk  with  them,  there  comes  always  the 
feeling  that  these  men  are  sadly  in  earnest,  sadly 
in  earnest  about  the  deepest  questions,  too,  dis- 
satisfied, longing  and  yearning  for  some  founda- 
tion on  which  their  lives  can  stand. 

So  if  they  are  in  doubt  and   unbelief  it  is  not 


THE  OUTLOOK.  23 

at  all  because  they  want  to  be.  What  they  do 
want  is  a  faith  and  a  foundation.  Only  you  can- 
not deceive  the  nineteenth-century  man  with 
words;  you  cannot  put  him  off  with  platitudes; 
you  cannot  any  more  satisfy  him  with  formulas, 
no  matter  how  logical. 

Our  advances  in  material  science  have  taught 
us  that  we  must  get  a  grasp  on  the  reality  every- 
where, and  that  nothing  can  stand  against  the 
working  Law  of  Nature  and  of  God ;  that  you 
must  have  your  principles  and  your  plans  stand- 
ing upon  the  foundations  of  organic  law  or  they 
cannot  stand  at  all.  You  must  be  able  to  test 
them,  to  try  them,  to  put  them  to  every  possible 
examination  that  belongs  to  their  line  of  investi- 
gation, or  they  will  be  of  no  use  to  you.  They 
must  not  fail  you  in  the  hour  of  your  supreme 
need.  So  it  is  an  age  of  questioning,  but  of 
serious  questioning,  an  age  that  stands  waiting, 
as  it  were,  but  with  throbbings  of  heart,  dissatis- 
fied and  in  restless  pain.  What  its  religious 
writers  call  its  "  infidelity "  is  not  at  all  "  Tom 
Paine  and  ditch-water." 

Now  there  are  questions  that  are  facing  us  and 
shall  hereafter  face  our  children,  which  questions 
serious  people  are  trying  to  get  answers  for. 
We  cannot  leave  them  unanswered.     There  is  an 


24  THE  OUTLOOK. 

irresistible  impulse,  and  it  is  felt  to  be  an  irresisti- 
ble necessity,  to  find  for  them,  if  we  can,  some 
solution.  We  are  going  to  pass  a  whole  mass  of 
them  over  to  the  twentieth  century,  and  we  do  not 
feel  that  we  can  burden  the  twentieth  century 
with  our  doubts  and  our  questions;  we  want,  if 
we  can,  at  least  to  find  the  basis  on  which  these 
questions  can  be  met  with  some  hope  of  an  answer. 
We  have  been  trying  to  solve  questions  all 
through  the  century,  and  the  most  stand  unsolved 
yet.  There  was  a  time  when  we  supposed  that 
universal  suffrage,  and  democracy  on  the  plane  of 
the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  were  going 
to  settle  all  problems  at  least  of  social  and  politi- 
cal life.  I  remember  the  time  well.  It  was  the 
accepted  faith  that  we  had  discovered  their  solu- 
tion, that  we  had  stated  the  formula  by  which  all 
could  be  settled  in  certain  doctrines  that  we, 
first  of  all  men,  had  found  out.  We  have  lived  to 
learn  that  there  is  not  a  single  question  that  has 
worried  and  worn  humanity  that  has  not  yet  to 
be  answered  in  these  United  States ;  that  the 
problems  of  crime,  of  pauperism,  of  ignorance,  of 
labor  and  of  capital  and  their  relations — that  all 
these  were  never  settled  and  never  can  be  settled 
by  any  amount  of  voting.  You  may  manufact- 
ure ballot-boxes  by  the  million  and  keep  the  entire 


THE  OUTLOOK. 


25 


population  of  this  country,  men,  women,  and 
children,  black  and  white,  doing  nothing  else  but 
dropping  ballots  into  them,  from  the  first  day  of 
January  to  the  last  day  of  December,  and  you 
cannot  settle  a  single  one  of  these  questions! 

There  was  a  time,  too,  when  we  supposed  we 
had  settled  the  problems  of  Political  Economy, 
and  we  have  awaked  to  the  discovery  that  ''  com- 
petition is  not  the  life  of  trade;"  we  have  awaked 
to  the  conviction  that  men  do  not  know  their 
own  interests  very  well,  and  very  surely  they  do 
not  carry  them  out,  and  that  all  the  axioms 
which  used  to  pass  current  in  that  "  science  "  are 
not  worth  the  paper  they  are  printed  on,  in  the 
face  of  changed  conditions  and  the  experience  of 
human  life. 

We  supposed  that  universal  education  wrs 
about  to  settle  some  problems  for  us,  and  uni- 
versal education  has  filled  the  penitentiaries  with 
men  who  can  read,  write,  and  cipher!  Crime  is 
no  less  on  account  of  all  this  so-called  education, 
and  there  is  no  evidence  that  it  ever  will  be  any 
less.  We  have  simply  put  into  the  hands  of  men 
the  power  to  commit  crimes  which  otherwise 
they  could  not  commit.  You  must  first  teach  a 
man  to  write  before  he  can  forge  your  name  to  a 
bank  check.     You  must  first  teach  him  chemistry 


26  THE  OUTLOOK. 

before  he  can  compound  a  subtle  poison  to  kill 
his  neighbor.  You  must  teach  him  a  great  many 
things,  make  him  very  intelligent,  before  he  can 
commit  a  great  many  crimes  which  are  exceed- 
ingly common  to-day. 

So  we  are  passing  out  of  the  century  with  all 
these  things  unsolved  about  us  yet.  The  sorrow 
of  the  world  lies  upon  our  hearts  and  consciences 
still.  The  moanings  and  cries  of  pain,  the  pitiful 
dumb  sufferings  of  men,  are  in  all  the  air  about 
us  and  appealing  to  all  our  hearts.  We  have  not 
stopped  poverty.  Men  are  starving  to  death  in 
Pennsylvania  mining  villages  to-day,  so  the 
papers  declared  this  morning !  And  men  in  Kansas 
are  burning  corn  to  keep  their  houses  warm! 
We  have  not  stopped  crime.  We  have  not 
stopped  ignorance.  We  have  not  stopped  vice. 
Improved  mowing  and  threshing  machines  and 
steam  plows  have  not  put  bread  into  the  mouths 
of  the  starving.  Rapid  transit  has  not  emptied 
the  slums  of  our  great  cities  yet.  Electric  lights 
and  telephones  have  not  made  one  criminal  less 
or  one  human  pang  of  pain  less  upon  the  earth. 
Still  the  hundred-armed  Briareus  lies  beneath  our 
civilization  and  tosses  in  pain,  moans  in  his  agony. 
Now  and  then  his  agony  finds  articulate  voice, 
and  a  terrible  voice  it  is.     Underneath  our  civil-^ 


THE  OUTLOOK.  27 

ization,  here  as  well  as  in  England  and  Germany, 
lies  the  pojoi  '.lity  of  a  revolution  and  an  upheaval 
which  will  send  down  the  pillars  of  our  state  in 
one  wide  ruin.  We  have,  in  the  United  States, 
the  bad  pre-eminence  of  being  politically  the 
corruptest  people  known  to  history,  by  our  own 
confession! 

So  the  age  is  growing  very  serious  at  its  close. 
I  think  the  coming  generation  will  be  more 
serious  than  their  fathers.  The  burdens  are 
coming  on  them  and  they  foresee  it.  Laissez 
yixzW— "  devil-take-the-hindmost,"  as  one  may 
say — will  not  answer  in  this  world  as  a  practical 
philosophy  any  more.  And  that  has  been  our 
political  economy,  and  our  politics  as  well.  Let 
every  man  take  care  of  himself;  the  weakest  can 
go  to  the  wall ;  the  strongest  must  always  suc- 
ceed and  trample  down  the  weak. 

So  far  we  have  been  trying  to  conduct  our  civ- 
ilization on  the  idea  of  v<2  victis,  "  woe  to  the  con- 
quered, triumph  to  the  victorious!  Let  him  that 
can  win.  Let  him  that  can  hold."  It  is  the  sur- 
vival of  the  fittest.  It  is  the  ethics  of  the  vulture 
in  the  air,  of  the  wolf  in  the  forest,  of  the  fox  in 
his  den.  According  to  its  ability,  power  or  cun- 
ning may  grasp  and  hold  and  the  weak  world, 
without  power  or  cunning,  must  be  content ! 


28  THE  OUTLOOK. 

Nevertheless,  with  all  this,  I  believe  the  world 
has  advanced  and  is  advancing,  and  that  the  nine- 
teenth century  is  the  best  century  that  ever  yet 
dawned  upon  the  earth.  I  believe  that  all  these 
things  that  I  suggest  as  questions  unsolved  will 
find  hereafter  their  right  answer.  I  do  not  be- 
lieve that  ruin  is  coming  at  all.  I  believe  that 
among  us,  whom  God  has  set  as  the  foremost 
people  in  all  the  world,  there  will  be,  in  the  long 
run,  no  disposition  to  shirk,  to  deny,  to  be  cow- 
ardly or  selfish  in  the  face  of  the  duty  that  lies 
on  our  hands.  I  am  very  sure  that  in  the  hearts 
of  us  all  there  is  a  strong  conviction  that  there  is 
an  explanation,  an  answer,  and  a  possible  victory. 

We  Christians  have  in  our  hearts  an  echo  of 
an  old  word  that  has  come  down  to  us  from  the 
plains  of  Syria,  "  Behold,  the  kingdom  of  God  is 
at  hand."  What  a  comfort  and  support  that  cry 
has  been!  The  echo  from  the  banks  of  the  Jor- 
dan and  the  villages  of  Galilee  has  been  to  us  the 
answer  to  the  world's  questions.  There  has  been 
all  along  a  strong  faith  in  the  hearts  of  our  people 
that  the  kingdom  of  God,  in  some  sense  or  other, 
is  a  reality;  that  it  is  bound  to  come;  that  what- 
ever may  not  lie  ahead,  that  kingdom  surely  does. 
We  have  staggered  on  blindly  and  helplessly, 
sometimes   most   ignorantly,  looking  to   see  the 


THE  OUTLOOK. 


29 


splendor  of  that  kingdom  rise  above  the  eastern 
hills  upon  the  weary  road  humanity  blindly  toiled 
upon,  worn  and  sick  for  the  long  waiting.  "  It 
will  all  come  right  in  the  end  "  is  an  American 
conviction.  We  have  been  children  of  hope  be- 
cause the  promise  of  the  kingdom  has  been  our 
birthright.  We  have  not  sunk  down  in  despair 
in  any  crisis  hitherto,  because  we  felt  that  God 
was  on  the  side  of  men — not  "  on  the  side  of  the 
strongest  battalions,"  but  on  the  side  of  the  weak- 
est and  the  poorest,  on  the  side  of  the  pauper,  of 
the  slave,  of  the  oppressed,  on  the  side  .  of  the 
down-trodden  and  wretched — that  God  was  on 
tJieir  side!  We  have  had  that  in  our  heart  from 
our  fathers'  faith ;  we  believed  that  and  it  has 
carried  us  on  so  far.  We  have  quoted  words  of 
Scripture  on  our  battle  fields.  In  our  struggles 
in  life  we  have  believed  they  meant  something, 
that  they  were  real ;  the  promises  would  stand  al- 
though the  day  gave  no  sign.  Has  all  that  passed 
away  ?  Shall  we  enter  upon  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury without  tJiat  ? 

That  is  the  fear  of  many,  you  know.  And  then 
they  turn  and  tell  us,  "  What  is  your  promise  of 
the  kingdom  of  God — what  is  it  after  all  ?  "  Your 
pulpits,  your  preachers,  and  your  teachers  have 
taught  you  that  the  promise  of  the  kingdom  of 


30  THE  OUTLOOK. 

God,  in  their  popular  theology,  meant  simply  this, 
that  men  must  suffer  in  this  world  ;  there  must  be 
always,  what  they  call  in  England  now,  "  a  re- 
siduum "  of  humanity,  a  scum  that  rises  on  the 
top  or  a  vile  sediment  that  sinks  to  the  bottom ; 
that  this  is  an  essential  condition ;  that  you  there- 
fore cannot  look  on  the  earth  for  justice,  or 
righteousness  from  man  to  man.  Men  in  the 
great  mass  must  be  content  to  suffer,  to  labor,  and 
to  die  and  be  buried  and  forgotten ;  that  the 
kingdom  of  God  means  that  if  they  bear  this  sore 
struggle  well  and  have  "  saving  faith,"  when  they 
die  they  will  go  to  heaven ! 

The  kingdom  of  God  and  the  promise  of  it 
have  been  used  in  this  way,  as  something  to  in- 
demnify people  for  the  sufferings,  shames,  dis- 
graces, and  failures,  and  all  the  falsehood,  wrong, 
and  cruelty  of  this  common  world.  "The  king- 
dom of  God  is  very  far  away.  You  reach  it 
through  the  portals  of  the  grave ;  you  must  die 
first  to  get  to  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  then 
there  shall  be  atonement  made  and  all  wrongs 
righted,  and  the  poor  will  be  as  happy  as  the 
rich,  and  the  sufferings  of  this  temporary  mortal 
life  will  all  be  compensated  by  glorious  rewards 
in  that  far-away  kingdom  to  come  !  '* 

Well,  that  thought  has  been  a  grand  support 


THE  OUTLOOK.  31 

to  men  in  darkness  and  distress.  That  hope  has 
carried  men  through  ages  of  sorrow  and  bitter- 
ness that  would  seem  might  have  crushed  them 
into  the  dust.  But  our  present  age  decHnes  to 
accept  that'  as  its  theory  of  the  kingdom  of  God. 
I  decHne  frankly  to  accept  it  myself  as  any  fit 
and  sufficient  theory.  I  look  back  to  the  early 
proclamation  of  it,  and  I  read  there  that  "  the 
kingdom  of  God  is  at  hand !  "  Where  ?  On  the 
earth  !  In  the  hearts  of  men!  I  read  there  that 
Christ  came  to  establish,  in  the  world,  the  king- 
dom of  God.  I  read  there  that  He  came  to  re- 
deem the  world,  that  He  came  to  make  this  com- 
mon earth  His  own.  And  so  I  am  glad  that  I 
have  lived  in  a  century  when  men  have  awaked 
to  that  interpretation  of  the  promise,  when  they 
have  said  to  their  teachers,  "  Nay,  you  shall  not 
console  me  for  an  injustice  reigning  here  by  the 
promise  of  a  justice  after  I  am  dead.  I  want 
justice  notv.  You  shall  not  starve  me  here  in  this 
world  and  then  indemnify  me  with  the  promise 
of  eating  bread  in  a  kingdom  of  God  hereafter. 
You  shall  not  let  my  children  die  for  want  of 
bread  and  try  to  comfort  me  with  religious  tracts! 
You  shall  not  forbid  me  and  those  belonging  to 
me  a  hovel  to  shelter  our  heads  from  earthly 
cold  and  heat,  and  expect  me  to  rest  content  with 


32  THE  OUTLOOK. 

'  the  promise  of  a  golden  mansion  hereafter  in  the 
heavens." 

The  God  who  reigns  in  the  heavens  reigns  here, 
and  this  world  is  His,  we  take  it,  as  well  as  the 
world  to  come.  If  this  world  does  not  belong  to 
Him,  what  world  does  ?  We  have  awaked  to  the 
denial  that  the  earth  belongs  to  the  devil.  We 
have  awaked  to  claim  the  earth  for  God  and  for 
man  and  man's  good,  to  say  it  is  His  and  He  hath 
given  it  to  the  children  of  men !  and  hereafter 
you  must  arrange  things  on  that  theory.  Neither 
priests  nor  creeds  nor  rulers  shall  teach  us  any 
more,  when  they  crush  men  to  earth  and  bind 
them  in  chains  of  slavery,  ignorance,  or  supersti- 
tion, that  it  is  all  right  and  we  shall  be  paid  for 
it  in  some  age  yet  to  come  if  we  accept  all  kindly 
and  lie  down  content  to  be  trampled  on! 

So  the  kingdom  of  God  has  come,  from  t.hat 
cry  of  the  past,  to  be  to  us,  in  this  nineteenth 
century,  another  thing  to  be  thankful  for.  It 
has  come  to  mean  a  new  idea  with  civilized. 
Christian  men,  from  the  farthest  extent  of  this 
land  to  the  extreme  of  Russia,  wherever  Christ  is 
worshipped.  They  are  rising,  in  the  large  mass 
at  last,  to  the  comprehension  of  the  fact  that 
this  earth  was  redeemed  by  Christ  and  that  the 
kingdom  of  God  is  a  thing  that  belongs  to  life 


rilE  OUTLOOK.  33 

and  time;  that  the  hope  and  purpose  of  Christian 
government  and  Christian  conquest  are  to  make 
the  kingdom  of  God  right  here  visible  on  the 
earth;  to  get  men  to  lead  their  lives  according  to 
the  laws  of  that  kingdom  ;  to  reproduce  upon  the 
earth  a  type  of  God's  spiritual  city  in  the  heavens; 
that  justice  and  mercy,  kindness  and  pitifulness 
must  be  the  currency  from  one  man  to  another 
here.  The  idea  finds  expression,  no  doubt,  in  many 
wild  words,  and  may  possibly,  in  many  wild  acts. 

ki  saying  this  we  are  going  against  a  bit  of  sci- 
ence, so-called,  of  to-day.  For,  strangely  enough, 
our  science,  in  some  of  its  lines,  is  working  with 
the  darkness  superstition  and  oppression  of  the 
past  on  this  very  matter  we  are  considering. 

It  is  said  the  earth  is  temporary  only;  it  carries 
within  itself  powers  to  destroy  it.  The  slightest 
variation  imaginable  in  the  motion  of  the  stars 
may  explode  it  in  an  instant.  It  may  fall  into 
the  sun ;  it  may  be  consumed  by  collision  with 
another  star;  but  a  terrible  end  must  come,  and 
it  must  finally  swing  back  into  the  eternal  fire 
mist  from  which  it  came. 

A  very  comforting  doctrine  and  a  very  ele- 
vating! It  viay  be  very  "  scientific,"  but  it  strikes 
me  as  being  rather  discouraging  to  us  who  are 

trying  to  do  our  day's  work  on  earth. 
3 


34  THE  OUTLOOK. 

"  What  do  I  care  for  a  two-penny  planet  that 
is  going  to  exist  a  couple  of  thousand  years,  when 
it  carries  nothing  but  my  bones  with  it,  anyway  ? 
I  shall  be  a  great,  strong  tyrant  if  I  can,  and  will 
live  in  it  and  have  my  good  time  in  it,  if  that  is 
the  end  of  the  business,  with  very  little  care  for  it 
or  anybody  or  anything  upon  it." 

So  scientific  men  are  working  with  the  darkest 
superstition  and  sorest  tyranny,  making  the  earth 
temporary,  a  shifting  bit  of  color  in  a  kaleidoscope, 
with  no  meaning.  • 

It  maybe  "science."  I  don't  know.  It  is  not 
what  I  get  out  of  the  revelation,  at  all  events, 
and  it  is  not  Avhat  I  believe  from  the  reason  I 
possess,  and  all  the  scientific  talk  in  the  world 
cannot  make  me  believe  it  for  one  instant,  be- 
cause such  talk  is  only  a  guess.  Of  beginnings 
and  endings  natural  science'knows  nothing. 

I  believe  that  God  made  the  earth;  I  believe 
that  Christ  redeemed  it,  and  that  the  Almighty 
has  a  great  drama  to  work  out  upon  it;  that  it  is 
not  an  accident ;  that  it  did  not  come  by  chance, 
from  any  fortuitous  gathering  of  atoms.  It  is 
here  for  a  purpose  and  to  be  brought  back,  finally, 
to  be  a  place  where  the  sons  of  God  can  live  and 
know  themselves  to  be  in  their  Father's  house. 
I  don't  know  but  all  men  have  it,  but  certainly 


THE  OUTLOOK.  35 

there  are  one  hundred  milHon  men  who  speak 
the  EngHsh  language  who  have  it  inborn  in  them, 
that  this  world  is  not  going  to  nothing  before  we 
have  settled  a  hundred  questions  or  so  that  need 
settlement,  before  it  has  become  meek  and  Christ- 
like, before  we  have  built  upon  it  the  grandest 
civilization  that  man  has  ever  dreamed  or  can 
dream,  before  we  have  made  all  men  free  upon 
it,  before  we  have  made  all  laws  just  upon  it,  all 
•cities  clean  and  sweet  and  pure  upon  it,  before 
we  have  extinguished  upon  its  face  murders  and 
thefts  and  violence,  before  we  have  made  it  a 
kingdom  sanctified  and  that  God  and  man  can 
bless!  In  our  hearts  there  lies  that  conviction  of 
the  golden  day,  that  belief  in  a  better  time  com- 
ing; it  has  moved  us  on  so  far,  given  us  all  our 
victories  so  far.  Our  people  have  never  despaired 
in  the  darkest  hour,  beca'use  we  have  believed  in 
the  future,  in  the  world,  and  in  God  and  in  that 
old  cry  from  the  wilderness,  "  The  kingdom  of 
God  is  at  hand !  "  notwithstanding  the  false  in- 
terpretation of  some  of  our  theology  and  of  a 
great  many  of  our  preachers. 

Let  us  hold  its  true  interpretation  which  is 
lying  to-day  in  the  heart  of  our  race,  that  the 
kingdom  of  God  has  meant  to  them  a  world  clear 
and  civilized,  sweet  and   fair,  a  world   of  happy 


36  THE  OUTLOOK. 

homes,  of  art  and  science  and  of  knowledge,  of 
justice  and  peace,  and  while  we  live  upon  it,  at 
least  we  "  Sons  of  the  Lion  line,"  shall  never  be 
satisfied  with  anything  less.  Our  kingdom  of 
God  means  that ! 

You  may  call  it  materialism.  We  want  to 
realize  it  now  in  the  body  instead  of  waiting  for 
the  spiritual  life.  It  is  right  that  we  should.  It 
is  a  mighty  impulse  to  all  our  efforts.  If  we  can- 
not realize  it  here,  how  can  we  prove  that  we 
shall  anywhere  ?  If  we  cannot  make  the  king- 
dom of  God  in  our  own  hearts,  lives,  neighbor- 
hood, town,  and  family,  can  we  make  the  kingdom 
of  God  anywhere  ?  Does  not  the  instinct  of  the 
practical  race  demand  that  we  shall  see  some- 
thing of  it  here  ?  That  we  shall  have  our  hands 
upon  it  now?  That  there  shall  be  some  earnest 
of  its  possession  ? 

And  so  our  views  of  "  religion "  have  been 
changing.  I  have  spoken  of  the  shaking  of  our 
faith,  of  the  cries  that  men  utter  because  what 
they  imagine  to  be  "  the  old  faith  "  has  been  dis- 
turbed. I  do  not  believe  that  what  I  hold  to  be 
the  Old  Faith  ever  was  or  can  be  shaken.  I  do 
believe  we  have  shaken  all  to  pieces  certain 
formulas  that  some  people  supposed  contained  it. 
They  have  passed  away.     This  has  by  no  means 


THE  OUTLOOK.  37 

'passed — the  sober  earnestness  with  which  all 
thinking  men  feel  that  they  are  responsible  to  an 
Awful  Unseen  Power  of  justice  and  righteousness; 
that  the  whole  world  altogether  is  responsible ; 
that  all  the  ages  have  been  wheeled  out  in  regular 
order  and  control  and  are  liable  to  the  judgments 
of  that  Almighty  Power  which  judges  always,  in 
the  long  run  and  in  the  final  bitter  end,  most 
irrevocably  righteous  and  true.  That  conviction 
has  been  deepening  in  the  minds  of  all  thought- 
ful people. 

And  there  has  been  a  sadness  about  it  while 
doing  so.  Our  literature  is  full  of  sadness  to-day. 
Our  poets  sing  in  minor  keys.  Our  very  science 
is  sad,  all  sad  and  bitter  earnest  under  this  tre- 
mendous conviction  of  which  I  speak.  You  can- 
not call  it  an  age  irreligious,  you  cannot  call  it 
frivolous.  Whatever  the  ripple  upon  the  surface, 
deep  down  in  the  thinking  hearts  of  thoughtful 
men  there  lies  this  solemn  and  tremendous 
conviction.  They  cannot  be  reached  perhaps  by 
the  old-worn-out  phrases,  they  cannot  be  impelled 
any  more  by  the  scares  with  which  preachers  used 
to  scare  them,  but  they  are  led  by  deeper  and  far 
more  commanding  terrors  than  those — the  terrors 
of  the  pressing  conviction  that  the  everlasting 
laws  of  love  and  justice   and   righteousness  are 


38    •  THE  OUTLOOK. 

working  straight  on,  grinding  day  by  day,  and 
like  all  the  mills  of  God,  though  they  grind  ex- 
tremely slow,  yet  they  grind  extremely  small ;  that 
no  man  and  no  nation  and  no  institution,  no  or- 
ganization no  system  can,  in  the  long  run,  go 
against  these  everlasting  laws  without  coming  to 
utter  wreck  and  ruin.     Praised  be  God  therefor ! 

So  we  shall  revise,  I  doubt  not,  a  great  deal  that 
has  perhaps  passed  for  "  orthodox,"  revise  out  of 
existence  a  great  deal  that  our  fathers  rever- 
enced !  Some  people  are  "  revising  "  their  "  Con- 
fessions of  Faith,"  so  called,  now.  But  in  all  our 
revising  we  shall  not  revise  away  the  Everlasting 
Faith  which  the  Lord  Jesus  brought  upon  the 
earth.  The  large,  broad,  fatherly  Theology  of 
the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  will  remain.  No  matter 
what  becomes  of  the  systematized  theologies  of 
the  theological  teachers,  the  eternal  principles 
they  think  upon  and  try  to  express,  and  some- 
times .y/z/press,  will  always  abide. 

We  must  enter  on  the  twentieth  century  with 
some  theory  of  a  cure  for  human  ills.  We  must 
have  some  standing-ground  to  meet  the  ques- 
tions existing  and  approaching.  In  order  to  settle 
these,  there  must  be  some  definite  and  clear  view 
of  man's  position  and  man's  belongings  on  the 
earth.     For  man  stands  facing  the  world  as  no 


THE  our  LOOK.  39 

Other  creature  does.  He  alone  can  say  "  I."  He 
is  a  person,  an  independent  existence.  His  first 
consciousness  says  to  him,  "  I  mn,  and  these 
things  are."  He  separates  himself  distinctly 
from  the  universe  as  soon  as  he  is  conscious  of 
anything,  and  the  whole  question  of  his  duties 
and  obligations  resolves  itself  into  a  question  of 
his  relation  to  the  world  and  of  the  world  to 
him.  "  How  do  I  stand  to  it  and  how  does  it 
stand  to  me?  What  business  have  I  with  it  and 
what  business  has  it  with  me  ?  How  did  I  come 
into  it  and  how  am  I  going  out  of  it,  and  while  I 
stay  in  it  what  have  I  to  do  with  it  ?  "  All  duties, 
the  whole  philosophy  of  life,  all  that  belongs  to 
human  living  will  centre  itself  in  such  questions. 
Every  sane  man  is  bound  to  make  some  satisfac- 
tory definition  of  his  relation  to  the  world  if  he 
thinks  at  all. 

So  it  becomes  to  us  a  matter  of  vast  impor- 
tance, to  the  men  of  this  time  and  of  the  next 
ten  years  of  special  importance,  how  they  are  to 
enter  upon  the  twentieth  century  of  the  Christian 
era,  with  what  helps  and  solutions  of  the  questions 
which  are  crowding  every  day  more  rapidly 
upon  them  and  upon  their  children.  The  ques- 
tions will  not  wait.  Europe  will  be  republican 
while  some  of  us  are  yet  in  our  prime.     It  may 


4° 


THE  OUTLOOK. 


be  communistic  while  some  of  us  are  yet  in  our 
prime.  You  cannot  put  things  off  by  repeating 
old  platitudes,  old  sophisms,  old  formulas — the 
questions  that  affect  men's  living  and  dying,  that 
affect  their  bread,  their  physical  health  and  well- 
being,  their  hopes  and  outlooks  when  they  have 
found  what  they  call  their  "  rights."  On  my 
way  from  Detroit  I  passed  an  insane  asylum. 
Any  man  who  has  thought  upon  it  will  tell  you 
that  insanity  is  increasing  among  us  rapidly. 
Yet  insanity  ought  scarcely  to  exist.  We  have 
gained  something  in  merely  providing  for  it. 

I  confess  that.  But  the  final  purpose  should 
be  its  extinction.  The  next  building  I  passed 
was  a  poor-house,  a  very  large  building.  A  poor- 
house  in  the  United  States  of  America  and  the 
State  of  Michigan  in  the  last  decade  of  the  nine- 
teenth century!  Clearly  a  poor-house  has  no 
right  to  exist  in  a  civilized  and  Christianized  land. 
Clearly  if  in  any  land,  then  not  in  ours — an  empty 
continent,  endless  wealth,  land  for  the  tilling,  and 
still  a  poor-house  !  We  have  ordered  our  matters 
so  stupidly  that  we  are  obliged,  it  seems,  to  have 
poor-houses.  A  poor-house  is  a  blot  on  the  land- 
scape. It  is  a  confession  of  imbecility  or  worse, 
a  disgrace  to  any  people,  and  yet  I  believe  there 
are    people  who   "point   to    them   with    pride!" 


THE  OUTLOOK.  41 

Men  ought  not  to  be  insane.  Men  ought  not  to 
be  in  a  condition  to  be  sent  to  the  poor-house. 
There  is  something  wrong  about  our  social  order, 
about  the  distribution  of  wealth  and  its  gains 
and  the  manner  of  gaining  it — -there  is  something 
wrong  somewhere  deep  down,  or  these  things 
could  not  be.  Insane  asylums,  poor-houses,  hos- 
pitals, orphan  asylums — they  are  proclamations 
of  folly  and  wickedness,  of  imbecility  and  false- 
hood ! 

You  may  talk  the  platitudes  of  your  exploded 
political  economy  if  you  want  to  be  thought 
learned,  but  wise  men  are  not  doing  that  any 
longer.  They  say,  "Away  with  that  trash.  Those 
old  musty  sweepings  will  not  pass  current  among 
men  who  do  their  own  conscientious  thinking 
any  more.  The  ground  must  be  taken  that  your 
asylums,  poor-houses,  and  jails  are  only  beggarly 
makeshifts,  that  in  a  sane  human  society  these 
things  are  shams  !  " 

We  pass  to  a  city  like  New  York,  and  we  learn 
that  one-half  of  all  the  children  born  in  the  city 
die  before  they  are  five  years  old!  Is  that  right  ? 
You  must  provide  children's  hospitals  and  Chris- 
tian refuges  for  them,  but  I  simply  say  that  chil- 
dren have  no  business  to  die  at  that  rate  any- 
where and  no  civilized  city  has  any  right  to  allow 


42  THE  OUTLOOK. 

it ;  that  a  city  that  cahiily  does  allow  it  and  pro- 
poses to  allow  it  ought  not  to  exist,  and  will  not, 
in  a  thoroughly  civilized  and  sane  condition  of 
things,  be  allowed  to  exist ! 

You  point  me  to  a  crowded  penitentiary  and 
tell  me  it  is  necessary.  Necessary  under  present 
circumstances,  yes.  And  I  am  glad  you  have  a 
big  one,  and  that  it  is  _/>///.  I  wish  you  had  three 
or  four  more  just  as  full!  You  would  not  have 
all  your  rascals  under  key  even  then.  But  men 
are  saying  that  penitentiaries  also  ought  not  to 
exist,  that  it  is  a  strange  thing  if,  after  all  these 
years  of  experience,  all  these  pulpits,  all  these 
Bibles  and  Christian  organizations,  these  common 
schools,  colleges,  and  universities,  that  still  a  large 
blot  upon  the  fair  landscape  in  a  State  like  yours, 
must  be  the  walls  and  towers  of  your  penitentiary ! 

Something  must  be  done  to  get  rid  of  peniten- 
tiaries, of  pauperism,  crime,  ignorance,  insanity, 
vice. 

Filthy  slums  of  cities  must  be  cleaned  out, 
fumigated,  deodorized  physically  and  morally. 
Such  are  problems  that  face  our  civilization  now, 
and  we  cannot  blind  our  eyes  to  them  and  excuse 
them  and  say  "it  is  all  a  part  of  life."  It  is  not. 
And  decD  conviction  is  coming  into  the  hearts  of 
the  people  all  over  this  broad  world — in  England, 


THE  OUTLOOK.  43 

Germany,  Russia,  France,  among  all  thinking 
men,  that  these  things  have  no  business  to  be, 
that  real  statesmanship  and  true  practical  poli- 
tics and  wise  ordering  and  governing  of  men  are 
to  direct  themselves  to  get  rid  of  these. 

In  our  own  country  people  are  becoming  tired 
of  a  politics  whose  idea  of  its  calling  is  the 
straining  every  fibre  of  its  body  in  drumming  and 
blowing  and  lying  to  elect  John  Jones  mayor  of 
Jonesville,  or  even  "  Honest  old  Jim  Jackson  " 
President  of  the  United  States !  My  purpose  to- 
night is  accomplished  if  I  have  helped  you  to  see 
that  we  have  not  yet  solved  all  the  problems  of 
the  world  by  universal  suffrage,  or  universal 
reading,  writing,  and  ciphering,  but  that  it  is 
nevertheless  our  bounden  duty,  above  that  of  all 
other  men,  to  try  to  solve  them  ;  that  the  solution 
of  them  is  in  the  air;  and  that  do  as  you  please, 
they  will  be  solved  in  some  fashion,  peaceably  or 
by  force. 

The  United  States  have  not  lived  for  one  hun- 
dred years  proclaiming  the  right  of  revolution  and 
government  for  the  people,  and  men's  inalien- 
able right  of  righting  their  own  wrongs — these 
have  not  been  preached  from  stump  and  pulpit 
and  in  political  conventions  until  they  have 
worked  their  way  down  into  the  abiding  convic- 


44  THE  OUTLOOK. 

tions  of  men,  and  of  men  in  other  countries  as 
well  as  our  own,  that  government  exists  for  the 
good  of  the  governed,  whether  it  be  state,  national, 
or  municipal,  without  producing  an  effect.  Ques- 
tions like  these  suggested  will  be  answered  in 
some  way. 

I  am  sure  we  shall  attempt  them  in  a  wise  way. 
I  think  we  have  not  been  led  out  of  the  northern 
forests,  have  not  wrought  and  toiled  and  thought 
and  endured  for  fourteen  hundred  years,  without 
having  found  out  how  to  deal  well  and  wisely  in 
the  supreme  crisis,  when  it  comes,  with  any  ques- 
tion that  God  brings  to  us  as  a  people. 

But  we  are  men  of  forethought.  We  want  to 
interrogate  to-morrow,  to  know  our  times  and, 
when  they  come,  stand  upon  the  right  ground 
manfully.  I  have  attained  my  purpose  if  I  have 
reminded  you  that  these  questions  are  pressing 
thick  and  fast  upon  us.  I  intend  to  examine 
what  I  believe  to  be  the  true  solution  of  those 
and  all  other  questions  that  touch  human  life 
upon  earth — solutions  drawn  from  the  life  of  our 
Lord  Jesus  Christ  and  lying  upon  the  pages  of 
the  New  Testament  itself,  solutions  to  which  we 
have  perhaps  been  blinded  by  a  too  narrow  the- 
ology, but  which  are  there  as  plain  a  guide,  it 
seems  to  me,  as  the  Ten  Commandments. 


LECTURE   II. 
LED  UP. 


"  Then  was  Jesus  led  up  of  the  Spirit  into  the  7uilderness." 

St.  Matthew  iv.  i. 


LECTURE  II. 
LED  UP. 

A  MAN  gaunt  with  long  fasting.  Around 
him  the  bare  rocks  and  the  brown  sands. 
Over  him  the  drifting  clouds  of  the  Syrian  sky. 

He  is  alone  in  the  silences;  only  the  wild  beast 
cries  from  the  rocks  or  the  eagle  screams  from 
the  splintered  crag. 

But  the  solitude  is  peopled  by  hosts  invisible. 
He  stands,  to  the  outward  eye,  alone.  But  the 
powers  of  darkness  and  the  armies  of  light  swarm 
where  he  stands.  Heights  that  lift  to  the  Throne 
of  God,  depths  that  swirl  and  sink  to  the  central 
hells,  peopled  heights  and  depths,  swim  from 
about  him  as  he  stands  alone — the  centre  of  the 
universe,  and  that  universe  alive! 

Such  is  the  vision.  Is  it  what  we  call  literal  ? 
You  can  debate  that  if  you  wish.  I  do  not  care 
to.  It  is  certainly  far  more  than  literal.  I  take 
it  to  be  spiritual  and  eternal. 

It  is  the  revelation  of  the  permanent  position 


48  LED    UP. 

of  human  existence.  You  miss  the  whole  pur- 
pose of  it,  I  think,  if  you  make  it  only  hteral, 
the  story  of  an  occurrence  which  began  and 
ended  in   itself. 

Who  is  this  man  in  the  vision  of  the  Evangel- 
ist ?  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  I  am  answered.  And 
again  I  ask,  Who  is  He  ?  Your  answer,  being  a 
Catholic  Christian,  would  be, "  The  Son  of  God, 
the  Second  Person  of  the  Holy  Trinity,  very 
God  of  very  God,  who  has  taken  our  nature  upon 
Him  from  his  Virgin  Mother,  and  is  therefore  also 
man  as  well  as  God.  the  Son  of  Man  as  also  the 
Son  of  God." 

You  answer  rightly-  But  notice  He  is  a  man 
in  this  strange  revelation  all  through.  He  never 
once  asserts  his  Divine  nature.  He  is  hungry  as 
a  man  might  be  after  a  long  fast.  He  needs 
food.  He  needs  to  be  ministered  to,  helped, 
served  by  some  kindly  and  loving  hands.  Look 
at  Him.  Listen  to  Him.  In  the  whole  transac- 
tion He  is  sheltering  Himself  and  defending 
Himself  with  only  human  weapons.  "  But  He  is 
the  Son  of  God  ?  "  Yes!  Only  in  the  use  of  that 
name  here  He  means  the  Son  of  Man.  In  this 
experience  He  claims  for  Man  the  Sonship.  "  If 
thou  be  the  Son  of  God  " — "Ma)i  doth  not  live 
by  bread  only."     The  two  names  here  are  equiva- 


LED    UP.  49 

lent.  He  is  standing,  faint,  starving,  and  alone, 
upon  His  human  Sonship  toward  God,  and  not 
upon  His  divine. 

I  marvel  that  the  situation  should  have  been 
in  any  case  minified  to  a  mere  lesson  of  resistance 
to  temptation,  and  still  more  that  it  should  have 
been  a  matter  of  debate  whether,  in  this  revela- 
tion of  His  life,  Jesus  Christ  can  be  counted  as 
an  example,  "  He  was  God,"  it  is  said,  "  as  well 
as  man.  He  could  not,  therefore,  really  be 
tempted  at  all.  He  was  sure  of  the  victory  from 
the  first.  There  could  have  been  but  one  issue 
to  this  struggle.  He  parts  company  with  us  here, 
ceases  to  be  the  guide  of  weak  humanity." 

Let  us  treat  this  no  longer  as  an  example  in 
an  episode. 

Jesus  is  the  infinite  and  eternal  Man.  The 
union  of  the  Divine  with  the  human  nature  made 
Him  so.  All  Catholic  Theology  tells  you  that. 
Why  be  afraid  of  its  broad  free  speech  ?  Why 
fear  to  look  into  the  depths  profound  or  the 
heights  infinite  which  its  loving,  trustful,  and 
childlike  confidence  reveals  with  thanks  to  our 
Father  ? 

"  The  Lamb  slain  from  the  Foundation  of  the 
World  " — remember  that.  Do  not  explain  out 
of  existence  the  words  because  they  do  not  fit 


50  LED    UP. 

into  some  system  of  theology  or  some  bundle  of 
dried  herbs  labelled  a  Confession  of  Faith ! 

Read  St.  John's  Gospel  at  its  opening,  and 
learn  that  "All  things  were  made  by  Him."  The 
Divine  Logos  who  was  with  God  and  was  God. 
Turn  to  Genesis  and  read  that  He  who  made 
man  made  him  in  His  own  image.  Poor  type 
enough  as  he  stands  a  very  wretched  and  broken 
image  now,  but  the  germ  of  another.  There  is  a 
strange  power  in  that  germ  impress.  We  are 
finding  out  more  and  more  about  it,  and  more  and 
more  it  is  wonderful,  even  overwhelming. 

The  stunted,  sun-burned  chaparral  on  a  Cali- 
fornia hillside  is  very  little  like  the  magnificent 
live  oak  with  girth  of  forty  feet  and  branches 
to  tent  a  regiment,  his  massive  roots  in  the  salt 
sand  listening  to  the  immemorial  murmur  of  the 
sea,  and  his  topmost  boughs  looking  for  the  white 
sails  coming  from  afar.  Yet  both  are  oaks  in 
grain  and  iibre,  in  blossom  and  in  acorn.  Such 
subtile  and  persistent  power  has  the  germ  to 
grow  its  own.  Such  likeness  in  unlikeness  does 
the  germ  power  preserve  and  develop. 

The  Fejee  Islander  and  the  educated,  cultured 
gentleman  of  New  York  or  London  are  startling 
contrasts.  There  is  no  mistaking  the  same  human 
imprint  on  them  each. 


LED    UP.  51 

We  are  poor,  broken  fragments  of  humanity  at 
best;  the  wisest  and  the  noblest  of  us  only  dis- 
tortions and  caricatures  of  the  Divine  Ideal. 

This  man  we  have  seen  alone  here  in  the  wil- 
derness is  the  only  genuine  man  that  we  know. 
In  Him  the  Church  of  God  from  the  first,  in  Her 
free,  bold  faith  and  love,  has  found  all  perfection, 
the  world's  idea  of  men,  her  own  idea  and  God's. 
He  boldly  flung  His  challenge  into  the  world's 
face  one  day — "  Which  of  you  convinceth  me  of 
sin?"  It  was  never  taken  up.  It  lies  there  yet 
— the  great  defiance.  Who  will  take  it  up  to-day 
after  nineteen  centuries  ? 

He  came  to  atone  for  our  sins.  Yes.  He 
came  to  die  for  us  and  rise  again.  Yes.  But  why 
stop?  One  theological  system  has  no  need  for 
Him  except  to  die  and  make  that  atonement ; 
sees  no  living  use  in  His  birth  or  in  His  resur- 
rection. Another  sees  in  Him  only  an  example, 
for  its  logical  completeness  has  no  need  of  His 
Divine  nature  or  His  death,  and  certainly  finds 
His  resurrection  an  embarrassment. 

Broken  lights  lead  us.  Half-truths  turn  to  lies 
in  our  hands.  Theological  chaff  is  threshed  on 
windy  threshing  floors,  and  the  few  grains  of  corn 
are  blown  away  with  it.  One  turns  to  the  old 
kindly,  childlike   faith   of    the   early   day,   which 


52  LED    UP. 

dwelt  lovingly  around  the  feeding-trough  in  the 
Kahn,  the  humble  house  in  Nazareth,  the  in- 
tensely human  life  He  lived  about  the  villages  of 
Judea  before  the  end  came,  and  denying  nothing, 
accepting  simply  when  the  meaning  is  too  deep 
for  mortal  vision,  finds  in  the  awful  and  eternal 
and  yet  the  household  and  homelike  mystery  of 
the  Incarnation,  the  sum  of  all  mysteries  and  all 
love.  Our  God  is  a  man — a  suffering,  sore-bur- 
dened, bitterly  tempted  man  who  died,  but  died 
Victor  and  Lord,  as  all  men  should  live  and  die! 

I  take  this  transaction  in  the  wilderness  to  be 
no  mere  accident,  no  passing  episode,  then.  It 
has  taken  such  hold  upon  the  consciousness  of 
Christendom,  that  from  the  first,  solemn  observ- 
ance has  gathered  about  its  memory.  It  is  kept 
alive  and  present  by  large  observance  of  due 
season  every  year,  by  special  prayer  and  fasting 
and  meditation.  A  whole  literature  of  devotion 
has  grown  around  it.  The  painters  have  dwelt 
upon  it ;  the  poets  have  sung  of  it  and  for  it, 
and  the  saints  of  all  time  have  adored  the  foot- 
steps in  the  desert  from  afar. 

If  I  ask  you  to  use  it,  and  let  me  use  it  with 
you  and  for  you  for  another  purpose  not  devo- 
tional especially,  not  for  the  touching  and  tender 
lessons  which  pious  souls  have  drawn  from  it,  but 


LED    UP.  53 

for  thoughts  and  conclusions  which  may  help  you 
and  others  in  the  hard,  common  work  of  common, 
every-day  life,  and  clear  your  vision  for  the  wres- 
tle, which  waits  you  and  all  with  the  rough  an- 
tagonists of  our  half-brutal  world,  do  not  imagine 
I  undervalue  the  other  lessons  I  have  mentioned, 
but  take  me  only  as  looking  at  this  strange  his- 
tory from  a  point  of  view  which  I  think  is  not 
often  occupied,  and  which  I  believe  to  be  perhaps 
only  possible  in  our  day. 

For  I  am  thankful  to  hold  that  old  faith  which 
is  not  afraid,  which  indeed  challenges  our  vision 
from  all  points  of  view  possible,  which  is  so 
grandly  orthodox  that  it  encourages  free  dealing 
for  human  good  with  its  profoundest  mysteries, 
which  is  a  living  growth  in  leaf  and  flower  and 
fruit  for  the  healing  and  help  of  all  men. 

I  take  it,  then,  that  in  this  transaction,  in  this 
revelation  from  the  land  of  vision — the  land 
where  all  things  are  real — Jesus  stands  especially 
for  Humanity.  The  Eternal  Man,  who  is  neces- 
sarily the  Son  of  God,  meets  life  and  its  questions, 
the  common  life  and  the  common  questions  of 
this  world,  as  all  men  are  called  to  meet  them, 
and  deals  with  them  and  answers  them  victori- 
ously, as  all  men  must  deal  with  them  and  answer 
them  if  they  also  would  win. 


54  JED    UP. 

The  Sermon  on  the  Mount  I  take  to  be  the 
revelation  and  promulgation  by  authority  of  the 
organic  law,  what  he  might  call  the  constitution 
of  the  Kindgom  of  God,  as  Christ  proposed  to 
establish  it  here  on  earth. 

The  revelation  of  the  man  in  the  wilderness  I 
take  to  be  the  setting  forth  of  man's  position  in 
the  world  as  it  is,  "  the  work-a-day  world,"  in 
which  the  Kindgom  of  God  is  to  be  established, 
in  which  it  is  man's  business  to  establish  it,  and 
the  methods  by  which  only  he  can  hold  his  own 
upon  it,  and  do  what  God  set  him  to  do.  Both 
are  logically  and  necessarily  connected.  The 
wilderness,  the  hunger,  the  trial,  the  tempting, 
the  struggle,  a  parable  of  things  as  they  are. 
The  conclusion,  a  declaration  of  what  the  end  is 
to  be.  The  Sermon,  the  proclamation  of  the 
principles  and  laws  by  which  Heaven  is  adminis- 
tered, and  by  which  only  any  real  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  may  be  established  upon  earth. 

Jesus  in  the  wilderness  stands  for  Humanity  in 
the  world.  It  is  a  rough  world.  It  is  a  wilder- 
ness to  the  Son  of  God.  His  spiritual  nature  is 
starved  in  it,  He  is  alone  in  it.  He  has  no  visi- 
ble companionship.  The  wild  beasts  cry,  the  wild 
birds  scream.  The  insects  float  in  the  air.  The 
crawling  things  creep  on  the  earth.     Humanity 


LED    UP.  55 

is  alone.  Man  is  the  hermit  of  time.  Among 
them  all  there  is  no  helpmeet  for  him. 

How  came  he  here  ? 

On  the  answer  to  that  question  turns  the  whole 
purpose  of  human  life. 

There  is  one  that  finds  voice  more  or  less  dis- 
tinctly in  our  time.  It  dogmatizes  in  our  science. 
It  finds  utterance  in  our  popular  literature.  It 
is  in  the  air,  as  we  might  say,  of  our  common 
thinking.  It  is  this.  "  Man  is  in  the  wilderness  as 
the  sand  is,  as  the  wild  beast  and  bird  and  creep- 
ing thing  are ;  as  the  acacia  bush  on  the  plain 
and  the  moss  upon  the  rock.  He  is  an  outgrowth 
of  the  desert.  He,  like  all  else,  is  a  product  of 
blind  forces  working  blindly,  their  highest  out- 
come as  yet.  But  he  belongs  to  the  wilderness, 
begins  and  ends  with  it." 

If  it  be  so,  there  is  this  strange  result :  his  whole 
life,  wheresoever  found,  is  a  protest  against  the 
wilderness.  The  centre  of  all  that  is  best  in  him 
is  the  moral  power  within  him.  And  that  moral 
power  is  in  absolute  rebellion  against  the  wilder- 
ness and  its  ways. 

If  he  be  a  product  of  the  \\'ilderness  he  should 
be  in  accord  with  the  powers  that  produced  him, 
with  the  laws  that  are  supreme  in  the  wilderness. 
There  would  be  no  morality  in  his  acts,  no  right 


56  LED    UP. 

or  wrong  in  anything  he  may  say  or  do.  He 
would  not  be  immoral ;  for  there  could  be  no 
immorality  if  there  be  no  morality.  He  would 
just  be  7w?i-mora\,  and  so  an  end. 

A  tree  falls  upon  a  man  and  kills  him.  The 
tree  is  blameless.  The  lightning  sets  his  barns 
on  fire  and  consumes  his  harvests.  No  man 
blames  the  lightning.  The  floods  break  their 
banks  and  sweep  his  fields  bare,  and  no  man 
blames  the  floods.  It  is  only  a  child  who  knocks 
his  head  against  the  table  and  cries  "  naughty 
table!"  In  the  natural  forces  we  look  for  no 
discrimination  of  moral  choice.  They  are  neither 
bad  nor  good. 

But  a  man  who  slays  another — shall  we  say  he 
is  like  the  tree  that  falls  and  slays  in  falling  ? 
Shall  we  say  that  the  act  is  entirely  non-moral, 
and  that  in  blaming  him  we  are  like  the  child 
who  strikes  in  anger  the  chair  against  which  he 
has  stumbled  and  hurt  himself,  calling  it  "  naughty 
chair  ?  "  Is  there  no  right  and  no  wrong  in  itself, 
but  only  a  relation  which  endures  for  a  day — the 
opposite  pole  of  selfishness,  called  "  altruism," 
which  decides  right  or  wrong  from  the  measure 
of  its  own  pleasure  or  its  own  pain  ? 

Was  the  man  who  gave  the  highwayman  his 
purse  at  the  muzzle  of   the  pistol    a  good  man 


LED    UP.  57 

because  he  gave  him  pleasure,  and  the  judge 
who  sentences  him  to  the  penitentiary  a  bad  man 
because  he  makes  him  suffer  pain  ? 

This  is  the  case,  and  all  there  is  in  the  case,  if 
the  man  in  the  wilderness  be  an  outcome  of  the 
wilderness.  No  stream  rises  higher  than  its 
source.  The  wilderness  has  no  moral  law;  and 
all  attempts  to  develop  a  morality  out  of  it  lead 
to  nothing  more  than  this — that  is  good  which 
gives  us  pleasure,  that  is  evil  which  gives  us  pain  ; 
but,  in  themselves  and  absolutely,  the  words  and 
deeds  of  men  have  no  more  moral  value,  than 
the  moaning  of  the  wind  at  midnight.  Right  and 
wrong  are  only  figures  of  speech  expressing  the 
effect  upon  ourselves  of  acts  or  agents. 

We  are  dealing  very  lightly  these  days  with 
the  foundations  on  which  our  lives  stand.  A 
philosophy  which  proclaims  that  a  man's  acts 
have  and  can  have  no  more  moral  purpose  than 
the  sweep  of  a  wave,  the  plunge  of  a  cataract, 
or  the  cry  of  a  jackal,  may  not  lead  at  once  to 
the  evil  that  its  common  acceptance  would  seem 
to  involve.  The  men  who  argue  out  such  a 
philosophy  are  very  little  likely  to  act  upon  it 
themselves,  as  little"  likely  as  any  men.  And 
then  old  traditions  of  the  cradle  and  the  house- 
hold  and  the   church,  hold   men  who  have  lost 


58  LED    UP. 

their  intellectual  faith  to  more  or  less  of  living 
upon  its  ethics  still. 

But  it  is  not  hard  to  see  that  the  philosophy  is 
having  its  effect.  It  is  descending  from  its  cold 
philosophic  heights,  and  finding  practical  accept- 
ance among  those  who  desire  freedom  from  all 
restraint.  The  air  is  full  of  it,  and  when  men  in 
large  numbers  accept  the  theory  that  conscience 
is  merely  a  hereditary  superstition,  and  right  and 
wrong  only  inherited  prejudice,  that  there  is  no 
absolute  right  and  wrong  in  the  universe,  and 
men  are,  in  fact,  just  as  non-moral  as  the  ox  or 
the  dog,  it  is  not  hard  to  see  that  there  will  be 
stormy  times  coming  for  the  twentieth  century 
of  our  civilization. 

It  is  the  peculiarity  of  Christianity  as  a  religion, 
that,  hi  the  technical  sense,  it  is  not  a  religion  at  all. 

The  so-called  science  of  comparative  religion, 
with  which  some  writers  and  thinkers  have  busied 
themselves  in  our  time,  fails  at  once  when  it  seeks 
to  include  the  religion  of  Jesus  Christ,  because 
in  their  sense  it  is  not  a  religion. 

I  mean  this :  that  all  other  religions  are  methods 
of  propitiation,  and  that  Christianity  is  not. 
They  begin  with  the  idea  of  an  invisible  power 
angry  always  or  angry  at  times,  at  least,  with  men, 
and  that  religion  is  a  method,  revealed  or  discov- 


LED    UP.  59 

ered,  by  which  the  invisible  power  may  be  made 
to  lay  aside  its  anger. 

Christianity  begins  with  the  declaration  that 
God  needs  no  propitiation,  that  He  has  already 
propitiated  Himself ;  that  no  sacrifice  and  no  offer- 
ing can  take  away  sin,  nor  make  the  Holy  One 
any  more  favorable  toward  the  suppliant.  God 
is  man's  Father,  and  changes  not.  What  He 
asks  is  that  men  shall  live  as  His  children. 

I  say,  then,  that  in  the  technical  sense  Chris- 
tianity is  not  a  religion  at  all.  It  is  an  ethics. 
It  is  a  life.  It  begins  with  a  God  appeased,  pla- 
cated, loving  and  pitiful  and  helpful  toward  men. 
He  is  so  of  His  own  nature.  Were  He  not  so,  all 
service  and  all  offerings  could  not  make  Him  so. 
Nothing  which  man  could  do  or  priests  contrive, 
in  ceremonial  or  sacrifice,  could  have  power  to 
change  the  Unchangeable 

The  religion  of  Jesus  Christ  is  purely  ethical. 
Its  simple  rites  are  so,  entirely,  in  meaning  and 
purpose.  They  do  not  propitiate  the  Almighty. 
They  are  helps  to  make  men  better.  They  are 
not  to  change  God.  They  are  intended  to  change 
men.  Christianity  is  right  living  after  a  divine 
model,  and  even  in  the  dim  shadow  of  its  slow 
development  long  ago  the  fact  was  not  obscure, 
when  the  proj^het  asked,  "  What  doth   the  Lord 


6o  LED    UP. 

require  of  thee  but  to  do  justly  and  to  love 
mercy  and  to  walk  humbly  with  thy  God  ?  " 

Godliness  is  Godlikeness.  And  there  is  this 
unique  characteristic  in  Christ's  religion,  that 
the  sum  of  it  all  is  to  grow  in  Godlikeness, 

There  have  been  religions  without  morality, 
like  the  Greek  and  Roman.  There  have  been  re- 
ligions absolutely  immoral,  like  the  worship  of  the 
Syrian  Melitta  or  the  Hindoo  Kali.  All  crimes 
and  all  vices  have  been  consecrated  to  the  service 
of  religion  at  one  time  or  another  among  men. 
There  is  no  necessary  connection  between  religion, 
in  its  technical  and  philospohic  sense,  and  right 
moral  living.  It  is  the  weakness  of  much  of  our 
popular  Christianity,  in  Protestant  and  Roman 
forms  both,  that  the  old  paganism  of  our  fathers 
has  never  been  quite  exorcised.  It  is  still  largely 
the  superstition  that  some  so-called  "  religious  " 
observances  can  atone  for  ill-living,  that  when 
we  have  sinned  we  have  made  God  angry,  and 
that  by  doing  some  specifically  religious  act  or 
saying  some  specifically  religious  word  we  can 
make  Him  forget  our  sin  and  be  pleased  wfth  us 
again.  Paganism,  you  see,  dies  hard,  and  so  far 
our  best  type  of  Christianity  has  been  only  a 
baptized  paganism. 

"Whatsoever  a  man  sowcth  that  shall  he  also 


LED    UP.  6 1 

reap,"  declares  the  law  on  which  we  stand.  No 
technical  religious  observances,  no  ceremonies 
and  no  rites  can  change  the  eternal  law.  A  man 
reaps  his  own  harvest,  here  or  other  where,  when 
the  reaping-time  comes,  and  feeds  himself  with  the 
bread  of  his  own  corn  when  his  corn  ripens. 

There  has  much  come  to  us  in  these  last  days 
for  which  we  should  be  thankful,  in  the  thinking 
which  is  fast  making  forever  impossible  the  poor 
heathenism  that  has  passed  for  Christianity  only 
because  baptized  under  a  Christian  name,  the 
systems,  shocking  to  our  moral  sense,  which  have 
been  imposed  upon  men  as  religion  while  they 
outraged  their  human  instincts  of  goodness  and 
kindness. 

They  are  "  revising  "  them.  Let  us  hope  they 
will  be  revised  out  of  existence  as  soon  as  may 
be,  as  outrages  upon  the  human  conscience  and 
libels  on  our  Father  in  Heaven.  And  let  us  hope 
also  that  with  them  will  go  the  artificial  morali- 
ties created  by  "  churches,"  so  called,  which  have 
been  imposed  on  human  consciences  as  higher 
and  more  important  than  the  divine  law,  as  even 
means  by  which  breaches  of  that  law  and  the 
violation  of  Christian  precepts  may  be  atoned 
for  by  "  religious  "  people! 

It  is  this  profoundly  ethical  character  of  Chris- 


62  LED    UP. 

tianity  which  has  emancipated  man  from  fear 
and  degrading  superstition  and  raised  him  to  the 
height  so  far  won.  It  for  the  first  time,  clearly 
and  with  commanding  force,  declared  "  the 
ought "  to  be  suprem.e,  that  only  by  uttermost 
submission  to  the  proclamation  of  *'  the  ought " 
is  there  to  be  a  life  possible  here  or  anywhere  for 
men.  That  so  tremendous  is  this  necessity  that 
the  awful  God  Himself  is  bound  by  it,  that  all 
His  worlds  are  kept  by  it  secure,  and  that  no 
man  nor  angel  can  escape,  or  hope  to  escape,  in 
this  world,  in  Heaven  or  in  hell,  from  the  in- 
exorable Law. 

And  as  the  basis  of  this  ethical  position  of 
man,  we  read  in  the  revelation  here :  "  Then  was 
Jesus  led  up  of  the  spirit  into  the  wilderness." 

The  Son  of  Man,  the  Son  of  God  is  not  a 
product  of  the  wilderness.  It  exists  already.  Its 
sands,  its  rocks,  its  thorns,  its  living  creatures 
are  all  there  already.  It  has  been  created  for  a 
purpose. 

I  am  not  going  to  discuss  the  origin  of  man's 
body  nor  how  that  body  may  have  been  builded 
by  its  Maker,  I  believe  in  a  Maker.  I  believe 
He  knew  perfectly  to  fit  means  to  ends.  But  if 
any  man  chooses  to  believe  that  something  in  the 
shape    of    man   roamed    the   earth   for   centuries 


LED    UP.  63 

even,  without  rational  speech  or  rational  sense 
or  anything  which  essentially  differentiates  man 
from  a  gorilla,  I  will  leave  him  his  belief.  I 
think  myself  it  is  a  very  foolish  belief,  and  has 
not  to  sustain  it  one  iota  of  evidence. 

But  I  do  believe,  because  it  is  quite  reasonable, 
and  Moses  puts  it  so,  that  man  was  just  an  animal 
as  he  was  first  created. 

We  have  the  precise  statement  of  that  fact. 
And  that  the  animal  being  made,  "  God  breathed 
into  his  nostrils  the  breath  of  tzvo  lives  and  man 
became  a  living  soul." 

In  this  theory,  then,  that  which  differentiates 
man  is  a  direct  creation  and  gift  of  God.  It  is 
so  direct  a  creation  and  gift  that  man  becomes, 
in  a  true  sense,  the  Son  of  God  and  God  can  be- 
come "the  Son  of  Man." 

Into  the  wilderness  of  mortal  life  and  time  this 
Son  of  God  is  "  led  up  "  by  the  Spirit.  He  is  a 
stranger  in  it.  He  has  something  to  do  with  it, 
and  something  to  get  out  of  it.  It  will  have  its 
effect  upon  him.  He  will  have  his  effect  upon 
it.  There  will  be  action  and  reaction  between 
him  and  the  wilderness,  but  he  is,  by  the  state- 
ment of  the  case,  a  stranger  and  an  enemy  even 
in  the  wilderness. 

The  other  voice  tells  us  that  there  is  no  Son  of 


64  I^ED   UP. 

God  in  the  case,  indeed,  that  there  is  no  God  to 
have  a  son ;  that  man  is  just  a  natural  output  of 
the  blind  dumb  forces  of  the  wilderness,  as  all 
things  are;  that  the  wilderness  is  his  home,  and 
his  only  home,  his  birthplace,  and  his  burial  place ; 
that  he  too  is  a  phenomenon,  like  all  the  rest,  a 
bubble  blown  upon  the  crest  of  a  black  wave 
which  sparkles  for  a  moment,  then  breaks  and 
disappears  forever ;  that  he  too,  like  all  the  rest, 
has  no  hold  upon  realities,  no  part  in  the  sub- 
stance of  things. 

I  have  spoken  in  my  first  lecture  of  some  of 
the  questions  that  we  are  called  to  face  in  this 
close  of  the  century,  of  the  shadowy  outlines  of 
grim-faced  problems  that,  in  the  coming  time, 
are  to  put  all  our  wisdom  and  valor  to  the  test. 

We  are  living  in  a  fool's  Paradise  if  v/e  fancy 
they  will  answer  themselves  with  no  concernment 
to  us.  Scientific  theories  come  and  go,  and  even 
philosophic,  say  their  say  and  pass  or  remain, 
with  the  various  "theories,"  no  doubt  valuable, 
in  their  time,  "  of  the  irregular  verbs."  There  is 
one  thing  always  present,  always  inexorable,  the 
judgment  of  actual  fact  upon  human  conduct. 

What  will  you  do  with  your  crime?  What 
will  you  do  with  your  ignorance?  What  will 
you   do  with  your  misery  and  poverty?     What 


LED    UP.  65 

will  you  do  with  the  broadening  and  deepening 
gulf  which,  under  all  the  forms  of  your  de- 
mocracy, divides  "  the  masses  "  from  "  the  classes," 
and  marks  the  meanest  and  lowest  difference  that 
in  any  civilization  ever  separated  man  from  man 
— money  ? 

Shall  we  answer  "  nothing  ?  "  We  can  if  we 
will.  But  facts  like  those  that  face  us  do  not 
take  No  for  an  answer.  They  are  quite  cold- 
blooded, and  insist  on  being  dealt  with  in  some 
fashion,  and  in  some  true  fashion — one  that  ex- 
presses the  reality  and  sense  of  things,  or  they 
turn  on  men  and  grind  them  to  powder.  We 
have  no  ground  to  suppose  that  we  in  this  coun- 
try are  to  be  freed  from  the  working  of  that 
most  inexorable  of  all  those  form.ulas  they  call 
laws — the  law  that  nations,  like  men,  must  reap 
what  they  sow. 

Human  history  and  experience  cannot  be  ruled 
out  from  any  wise  human  thinking.  They  are 
as  much  parts  of  nature  as  animals  or  plants  or 
chemical  combinations.  There  are  also  just  as 
sure  laws  by  which  they  come  to  pass. 

In  facing  the  questions  of  our  complex  civiliza- 
tion the  first  thing  to  be  settled  is  man's  own  re- 
lation, to  the  world  in  which  he  finds  himself. 
5 


66  LED   UP. 

Necessarily  all  his  subsequent  words  and  acts 
will  be  determined  by  that  settlement. 

If  he  has  been  produced  by  the  natural  forces, 
as  he  calls  them,  working  on  the  earth,  responsi- 
bility does  not  exist.  He  did  not  make  the  past. 
He  cannot  influence  the  future.  Free  moral 
agency  is  excluded  from  the  forces  that  affect 
results.  It  has  no  power,  never  had  any,  and 
never  can  have.  It  cannot  be  evolved  out  of  the 
play  of  forces  which  are  not  free. 

Our  position,  therefore,  is  that  of  utter  helpless- 
ness before  whatsoever  the  future  may  threaten 
or  promise.  We  are  tied  hand  and  foot  amid 
the  interplay  of  beneficent  or  destructive  activi- 
ties. We  must  dumbly  wait  an  issue  we  are 
powerless  even  to  modify. 

And  we  may  make  a  philosophy  out  of  this! 
Indeed,  it  has  been  done.  We  may  take  man 
and  his  relations  and  associations,  his  history  in 
nations  and  communities,  as  a  part  simply  of  the 
exhibition  of  the  same  forces  that  show  them- 
selves in  the  growth  of  grass  and  trees,  in  the 
movements  of  tides  and  winds,  and  tabulate  the 
facts  and  compare  their  connections,  accepting 
the  past  as  it  has  been  and  the  present  as  it  is, 
and  try  to  draw  therefrom  the  law  of  frequencies 
and  sequences— just  so  much  murder,  so  much 


LED    UP.  67 

robbery,  so  much  disease,  so  much  insanity,  on 
general  averages,  and  always  with  the  assump- 
tion underneath  that  there  is  no  personal  choice 
to  modify,  no  element  of  free  determination  to 
check  or  change,  and  we  may  call  it  "  The  Phi- 
losophy of  Sociology,"  or  any  big  name  we  like. 

But  back  of  all  these  lies  in  you  and  me  the 
consciousness  that  we  can  change,  that  we  can 
prevent  now,  that  men  could  have  prevented 
and  could  have  changed  in  the  past.  And,  still 
more,  the  conviction,  inherent,  impossible  to  alter, 
that  we  ourselves  ongJit  to  prevent,  ought  to 
change  many  things  which  are  and  are  coming, 
that  men  in  the  past  not  only  might,  but  ought 
to  have  done  things  w  iich  they  did  not  do,  and 
have  left  undone  many  things  which  they  did  do 
— that  Neros  and  Borgias  were  just  as  responsi- 
ble as  Howards  and  Washingtons,  in  fact,  that 
Neros  and  Borgias  had  no  right  to  be. 

There  emerges — that  is,  whenever  a  man  thinks 
seriously — the  two  facts  which  are  persistent  in 
his  consciousness.  First,  that  he  is  free.  Second, 
that  there  is  an  "  I  ought."  He  passes  no  judg- 
ment upon  any  other  man  without  recognizing 
these  two  facts  as  universal,  necessary,  and  indis- 
putable in  human  nature. 

History  forms  a  great  portion  of  literature,  in 


68  LED    UP. 

some  respects  its  most  serious  portion.  All  his- 
tory is  filled  with  judgments  upon  the  men  and 
the  facts  of  the  past,  and  all  these  judgments  are 
made  upon  the  accepted  principle  that  men  are 
not  and  never  have  been  under  control  of  phe- 
noincna,  that  they  could  make  and  ought  to  make 
their  decisions  without  reference  to  any  powers 
in  the  world  of  phenomena,  but  solely' with  refer- 
ence to  principles  which  belonged  to  them  as 
free  men  under  the  law  of  human  duty.  The 
historian  of  Rome  has  no  more  hesitation  in 
making  such  judgments  than  the  historian  of 
England.  Each  holds  men  and  the  moral  nature 
of  men  responsible  for  the  course  of  human 
events  in  a  degree  apparently  unlimited. 

Have  they  been  all  mistaken  ?  Has  the  situa- 
tion which  exists  to-day  over  the  earth  no  result 
within  it  of  human  freedom,  of  human  right- 
doing  or  wrong-doing  ?  Is  it  the  outcome  merely 
of  physical-world  forces  blindly  working  without 
purpose  ? 

If  we  accept  this  (and  it  is  the  conclusion,  let 
us  remember,  of  that  '*  naturalism,"  rather  tin- 
naturalism,  which  declares  man  a  product  of  the 
world,  a  development  of  physical  forces,  a  neces- 
sary growth  of  the  wilderness),  then  all  our  his- 
tory books,  from  Herodotus  to  Froude,  from  the 


LED    UP.  '69 

Book  of  Chronicles  to  the  Life  of  Abraham  Lin- 
cobi,  are  a  mass  of  impertinent  trash,  blaming 
where  no  blame  was  due  and  praising  where  no 
praise  was  owed,  and  taking  for  granted,  all 
through,  a  freedom  where  there  was  no  freedom 
and  a  duty  where  no  duty  could  exist,  but  also 
all  ordered  and  deliberated  effort  on  the  part  of 
man  to  guide  the  future  in  any  way,  to  help  the 
good  and  put  down  the  evil,  is  necessarily  a  child- 
ish dream. 

We  turn  from  this  to  the  other  position — di- 
rectly opposed — revealed  to  us  in  this  vision  and 
revelation  in  the  wilderness. 

The  wilderness  exists.  There  is  no  word  of 
hozu  it  exists  or  hozv  it  came,  or  what  is  to  be  the 
end  of  it,  so  far.  It  is  here,  and  God  leads  up 
that  strange  lonely  being,  His  Son — the  Son  of 
Man — into  the  wilderness.  He  is  led  up  for  pur- 
poses which  belong  to  Himself.  The  wilderness 
exists  for  Him,  not  He  for  the  wilderness.  He  is 
in  it,  in  that  which  makes  Him  the  Son  of  God 
and  the  Son  of  Man,  a  sojourner  and  a  stranger. 
While  influenced  by  the  situation  affected  by  the 
environment.  He  is  entirely  conscious  that  He  and 
the  environment  are  two.  He  stands  upon  His 
feet  and  says  "/."  He  is  the  only  creature  on 
earth  that  can  say  that  small  syllable.     He  says. 


70 


LED    UP. 


"/  am  an  hungered."  "/  am  thirsty."  "/  am 
cold."  He  says,  "  I  will  eat."  "  I  will  drink." 
"  I  will  clothe  myself."     "  I  will  warm  myself." 

Even  in  His  lowest  animal  needs  He  forms  his 
resolution  and  formulates  it  if  need  be  in  speech. 
In  the  most  purely  animal  necessity  He  distin- 
guishes Himself  from  His  environment.  The  first 
conscious  lesson  the  infant  learns  is  that  he  is  an 
"  I,"  and  that  he  exists,  by  no  means  always  in 
accord  with,  but  far  oftener  in  direct  resistance 
to,  the  things  which  are  not  "/." 

And  this  Son  of  God,  distinct  and  conscious  of 
Himself  as  being  in  the  world,  and  yet,  in  the 
most  serious  meaning,  no  part  of  it,  is  also  con- 
scious that  He  is  free,  that  He  can,  in  any  possible 
contingency  of  two  courses,  choose  which  He  will, 
and  moreover  is  conscious  that  in  all  His  import- 
ant decisions  there  comes  in  the  question  of  the 
course  He  otight  to  take,  the  duty  He  ought  to  do. 

In  his  highest  development,  his  most  conscious 
differentiation  from  the  environment,  there  rises 
finally  the  conviction— one  might  almost  say  in- 
born conviction — in  the  loftiest  people,  that  he  is 
responsible  for  the  wilderness,  held  to  answer  for 
the  condition  of  his  environment. 

Before  the  fact  a  mass  of  mere  metaphysical 
cobwebs,  more  or  less  systematic  and  philosophic, 


LED    UP.  71 

are  ruthlessly  swept  to  the  winds.  "  lyTan  influ- 
enced by  environment  ?  "  Yes!  "  Man  educated 
by  environment  ?  "  Yes  again.  "  Man  largely  the 
product  of  the  environment?"  Why,  surely! 
Only  when  you  have  phrased  your  phrases  to 
suit,  do  not  imagine  you  can  weave  them  into  a 
system  and  explain  things,  for  here  comes  a  man 
one  day  who  lifts  up  his  voice  and  cries :  "  Your 
environment  is  a  shame  and  a  curse,  a  lie  and  an 
infamy,  and  yoii  are  responsible  for  it  !  You  have 
made  it,  or  you  allow  it  to  stand.  In  the  name 
of  God,  away  with  your  environment !  Sweep  it 
into  the  limbo  of  things  accursed  by  men  and 
God  !  Get  rid  of  it  on  your  peril,  or  you  and 
your  environment  together  will  be  swept  into  the 
general  rubbish-heap  of  the  universe  by  the  in- 
exorable law  in  such  cases  made  and  provided, 
and  the  common  conscience  of  humanity  will  say, 
*  served  you  both  right,'  " 

We  never  rise  to  mend  an  old  evil,  we  never 
band  together  to  bring  in  a  new  good,  we  never 
rouse  ourselves  to  any  onward  step  upon  the  road 
of  human  progress,  that  we  do  not  proclaim  our 
conviction  that  man  is  morally  responsible  for 
his  environment. 

People  die  in  the  foul  slums  of  our  cities.  Dare 
any  man  say  they  ought  to  die  ?     Is  it  not  the 


72  LED    UP. 

unspoken  and  the  outspoken  conviction  of  all 
civilized  men  that  they  had  no  business  to  die, 
that  the  environment  which  brought  sickness  and 
death  was  a  foul  thing  for  which  are  held  re- 
sponsible some  men,  somewhere,  always  ? 

And  children  grow  up  in  the  same  slums  into 
outcast  women  and  criminal  men,  "  The  envi- 
ronment produced  them."  Yes.  A  horrible  and 
accursed  environment,  for  whose  existence,  for 
one  day,  the  inexorable  law  holds  some  men  re- 
sponsible, and  to  whom  some  day  it  will  mea- 
sure out  the  penalty  in  a  harvest  of  their  own 
sowing. 

Day  by  day  true  science  has  been  bringing  to 
the  common  conviction  more  and  more  the  tre- 
mendous responsibility  that  rests  on  men  for  the 
condition  of  the  world  they  live  in.  While  one 
set  of  men,  dealing  with  the  same  facts  of  human 
knowledge  and  scientific  discovery,  have  seen  in 
them  only  materials  for  subtle  metaphysical  cob- 
webs in  which  to  entangle  their  own  thoughts, 
another  and  a  wiser  set,  and  a  far  larger,  who  see 
that  knowledge  is  worth  the  good  it  does,  have 
seen  in  these  same  facts  additional  pledges  for 
human  duty  and  graver  weights  of  man's  re- 
sponsibility toward  himself  and  the  world. 

We  may  pass  the  first.     I  think  the  froth  and 


LED   UP.  73 

scum,  rising  quicker  to  the  surface,  is  quicklier 
blown  away. 

Thankful  for  the  larger  illumination  the  larger 
knowledge  gives,  the  vital  question  is  not  what 
theories  you  can  invent  about  the  universe  and 
its  origin,  or  man  and  his  origin,  from  the  little 
vantage  ground  that  larger  knowledge  gives,  but 
how  can  you  order  that  knowledge  and  organize 
it  to  make  man  better  and  his  life  more  master- 
ful and  victorious  upon  the  earth  ? 

And  so  there  is  growing  upon  us  the  conviction, 
always  I  think  latent,  but  impossible  of  outward 
utterance  at  all,  until  Jesus  fought  His  fight  in 
the  wilderness,  and  not  until  now  capable  of 
emphatic  and  resolute  utterance — namely,  the 
moral  conviction  that  men  are,  apart  from  all 
theories,  responsible  for  the  world  they  live  in. 

There  is  no  expression  even  of  any  such  con- 
viction as  a  feeling  in  ancient  literature,  sacred 
or  profane.  It  is  first  put  into  words  by  Jesus 
Christ :  "  Go  ye  into  all  the  world  and  preach 
the  Gospel  to  every  creature."  There  is  the  con- 
viction in  germ,  as  the  oak  is  in  the  acorn. 

How  it  has  grown!  And  now,  with  all  the 
light  of  the  ages  thrown  upon  it,  the  declaration 
flames  across  the  pillared  front  of  every  capitol, 
of  every  temple  of  learning  and  law,  as  of  science 


74  I^ED   UP. 

and  religion;  it  is  emblazoned  on  the  folds  of 
every  Christian  people's  standard  ;  it  fills  their 
literature,  and  chants  itself  in  all  their  poetry^ — 
man  is  responsible  for  the  world. 

Away  with  your  dreary  talk,  as  of  the  darkest 
of  all  dark  ages,  of  "  man  being  the  product  of 
his  environment  !  "  The  new  day  and  the  new 
knowledge  cries  aloud  to  all  the  stars,  "  Man  is 
responsible  for  all  environments.  He  has  so 
won,  so  mastered  on  this  earth,  that  his  own  con- 
science is  his  own  witness  that  he  must  annihilate 
environments  that  will  harm  him  or  his,  that, 
among  other  things,  he  has  mastered  or  can  mas- 
ter any  environment  whatsoever,  physical  and 
moral,  and  that  the  ages  to  come  and  the  inex- 
orable laws  which  bring  those  ages  in  will  hold 
this  age  responsible  for  the  environments  it  al- 
lows to  stand  !  " 

There  is  absolutely  no  hope  in  the  position  as- 
signed us  in  this  world  by  "  the  Dirt  Philosophy," 
which  has  turned  itself  into  a  metaphysics  and 
declares  we  men  are  the  results  of  blind  ''  natural 
selection  "  and  the  survivors  in  that  immemorial 
Kilkenny-cat  fight — "  the  struggle  for  existence." 
In  that  case  we  would  only  have  to  stand  aside 
and  let  the  selection  keep  on  selecting  and  philo- 
sophically watch  and  speculate  upon  the  issues 


LED    UP.  75 

of  that  feline  prize-fight  conducted  in  the  world's 
big  ring,  where  it  seems  to  be  a  universal  rending 
and  devouring  of  all  but   "  the  fittest  to  survive." 

The  selection  and  the  fight  have  "  let  Jis  out," 
at  all  events,  and  if  we  are  wise  we  will  meddle 
with  neither  any  more,  except  to  stop  the  cater- 
wauling ! 

But  we  are  men  of  our  century.  And  the  two 
tremendous  words,  Duty,  Responsibility,  flame 
before  us  night  and  day,  and  utter  themselves  in 
every  air,  thank  God,  we  breathe. 

Suppose  we  take  the  plain  ground  of  human 
position  plainly  revealed  in  the  elder  Son.  We 
will  rid  ourselves,  at  least,  of  all  logical  incon- 
sistencies. Duty  and  responsibility  and  the  call 
of  our  time  will  have  rational  foundation. 

We  are  the  Sons  of  God.  It  is  a  high  descent. 
But  nevertheless  we  are  assured  of  it  by  many 
voices.  We  are  in  the  wilderness.  But  we  must 
bear  ourselves  in  the  wilderness  as  Sons  of  God. 
It  is  our  only  safety  and  peace. 

We  did  not  come  into  the  wilderness  of  our 
own  motion.  Neither  did  we  come  by  chance. 
Far  less  did  we  not  come  at  all  but  just  sprout 
there  like  funguses.  We  came  by  law  too,  in  due 
order  and  by  due  process,  and  by  an  intelligent 
and  reasonable  law  which  had   a  purpose.     We 


76  I.ED    UP. 

are  not  "  freaks,"  but,  poor  as  we  are,  legitimate 
children  of  the  Family,  so  that  the  eternal  Son 
"  is  not  ashamed  to  call  us  brethren." 

And  being  in  the  wilderness  we  are  on  our 
Father's  ground.  He  owns  it  and  has  committed 
it  to  us  to  occupy  for  a  time  and  a  purpose. 
Manifestly  we  have  some  relation  with  it,  some- 
thing to  do  in  it  and  for  it  and  for  the  other  sons 
who  are  led  up  like  ourselves. 

Duty  emerges.  Responsibility  canopies  life. 
Hope  shows  the  way  on,  and  stands  with  us  at 
every  struggle.  The  Sons  of  God  must  bear 
themselves  worthy  of  their  high  relationship. 
They  must  better  things.  They  must  help  the 
weak.  They  must  pity  the  wretched.  They 
must  stretch  hands  down  to  the  fallen.  They 
must  do  justice.     They  must  love  mercy. 

In  short,  they  must  be  civilized,  do  you  not  see, 
in  the  very  highest  sense  of  that  word  ?  And 
they  must  be  civilizers,  improvers,  reformers, 
menders  of  things,  menders  of  themselves,  and 
menders  of  the  world ! 

They  cannot  let  things  alone  unless  things  are 
right.  There  is  a  divine  hunger  and  thirst  upon 
them  to  straighten  the  crooked,  and  clean  out 
the  foul,  and  make  the  dark  things  light.  The 
more  they  are  conscious  of  the  Sonship  the  higher 


LED    UP.  77 

they  grow  into  its  conception,  the  intenser  be- 
comes their  unrest  and  discontent  with  the  wil- 
derness as  a  wilderness.  They  will  not  be  satis- 
fied till  they  make  it  blossom  as  the  rose.  The 
wilderness  of  their  hunger  and  their  trial  must 
be  a  wilderness  to  which  angels  may  come  before 
they  are  done  with  it,  or  their  business  in  it,  set 
by  Him  who  led  them  into  it,  is  not  complete. 

So  to  gird  ourselves  for  the  work  before  us,  to 
get  standing-ground  for  the  wrestle  with  the 
problems  whose  grim  faces  frown  out  of  the  com- 
ing days,  we  turn  to  the  vision  of  Him  who  stood 
for  us  all,  the  one  Son  of  Man  and  Son  of  God 
who  held  His  place  in  the  wilderness  and  solved 
forever  the  law  of  living,  revealed  the  secret  of 
the  battle  and  the  victory  for  all  the  Sons  of  God  I 


LECTURE  III. 
TEMPTED. 


To  be  tempted  of  the  devil. " 

St.  Matthew,  iv.  i. 


LECTURE  III. 

TEMPTED. 

1 T  is  a  hard  saying.  Who  can  hear  it  ?  We 
*  say,  "  Lead  us  not  into  temptation."  Yet 
we  are  told  here,  according  to  our  argument, 
that  man  is  led  up  by  the  Spirit,  which  is  the 
Spirit  of  God,  into  the  wilderness  of  life  and 
time,  for  the  express  purpose  of  being  tempted  of 
the  Devil  I 

The  Prayer  is  the  human  instinct  uttering  itself 
to  God,  a  right  childlike,  trembling,  timid  prayer 
which  the  tender  Father  hears  and  answers  in 
His  own  wise,  pitiful,  fatherly  way.  "  Do  not  let 
it  be  too  hard  for  me.  Remember  I  am  but  a 
child.  The  road  is  rough,  the  sand  is  bare,  the 
sun  beats  hard,  and  my  feet  bleed  on  the  sharp 
flints.  Do  not  lead  me  into  temptation  and  leave 
me.  Stand  by  me.  Help  me.  Lead  me  through. 
Expose  me  not  too  much,  seeing  what  I  am." 

The  Prayer  is  tJiat,  perhaps,  or  that  is  part  of 
what    the    Prayer    means.     I    do    not   know.     It 


82  TEMPTED. 

means  far  more  than  I  can  understand,  as  all  the 
Lord's  words  do.  I  know,  however,  that  while  I 
pray  the  prayer  with  all  my  heart,  and  know  the 
prayer  is  answered  and  is  divine,  it  is  also  the 
fact  that  I  am  tempted,  and  that  temptation  is 
the  law  of  life. 

Now,  the  revelation  or  the  discovery  of  a  Law 
does  not  make  the  Law.  The  Law  is  there  all 
the  same,  whether  one  know  it  or  not.  What- 
ever difficulty  may  be  in  the  Law,  let  us  not  fool- 
ishly blame  him  who  shows  it  us  as  if  he  created 
it  of  his  own  caprice. 

The  plain  fact  is,  when  we  look  carefully,  that 
the  world  is  so  ordered  that  it  is  a  trial  place,  a 
testing  place,  a  tempting  place  for  this  unique 
being  Man,  who  finds  himself  led  up  into  it  by 
some  will  stronger  than  his  own. 

All  trial,  test,  and  tempting  involve  the  possi- 
bility of  failure.  They  lead  to  failure  again  and 
again.  That  is  the  law  of  the  case  too.  We  have 
to  accept  that.  It  is  terrible  and  it  is  mysterious, 
but  a  certain  amount  of  ruin  is  involved  in  all 
testing. 

They  test  rifle-barrels  at  the  arsenal.  A  cer- 
tain number  burst  and  are  ruined  in  the  test.  If 
they  had  not  been  tested,  they  might  pass  for 
very  good    rifle-barrels,    until   in   some   supreme 


TEMPTED.  83 

crisis  of  the  nation's  life,  they  go  to  pieces,  de- 
stroy an  army,  and  lose  a  great  cause. 

They  test  sword-blades  also,  and  a  ratio,  pretty 
constant,  go  to  pieces  in  the  trial.  A  certain 
number  of  cannon  always  burst  in  testing,  and 
become  so  much  rubbish. 

But  notwithstanding,  we  must,  at  any  cost,  have 
sabres  on  which  our  cavalry  can  depend  and 
cannon  which  will  not  fly  to  pieces  and  deal 
death  among  our  artillery-men  when  a  hostile 
fleet  lies  in  the  ofling. 

It  goes  everywhere.  When  we  want  a  genuine 
thing  we  put  it  to  the  trial,  we  test  it,  attempt  it, 
being  engine,  ship,  bridge,  or  what  you  will,  and 
in  every  case  there  is  a  certain  risk  involved,  and 
the  possibility  of  destruction  to  the  thing  we  test. 

The  law  of  "  the  survival  of  the  fittest,"  so 
called  by  scientists,  goes  much  further,  we  shall 
find,  than  they  dream.  It  appears  to  me  they 
have  gotten  the  measure  of  one  small  segment 
of  a  fact  which  pervades  the  universe,  invisible  as 
well  as  visible,  which  indeed  is  a  necessary  fact 
(or  law,  if  the  word  pleases  one  better  and  does 
not  mislead  him  to  think  it  anything  more  tJian  a 
zvord)  of  the  entire  universe  being  what  it  is. 

And  the  fact  is  a  most  irrational  and  cruel  one 
at  the  first  consideration.     It  involves  death  and 


84  TEMPTED. 

ruin  by  wholesale.  The  thing  is  tried,  that  is, 
tempted,  put  to  the  attempt,  and,  in  the  million 
upon  million  of  instances,  the  attempt  destroys  the 
thing  ! 

Of  the  myriad  blooms  upon  the  trees  in  spring- 
time, how  many  develop  into  ripened  fruit  in  the 
autumn  ?  Even  under  man's  intelligent  and  anx- 
ious care  in  our  walled  orchard  closes,  the  abor- 
tions of  bloom  and  fruit,  tried  by  rain  and  wind 
and  sun,  and  tested  by  insect  enemy,  which  fail 
and  come  to  nothing,  are  beyond  reckoning.  Left 
to  the  unguarded  conditions  of  the  open  field 
and  forest,  it  is  but  one  here  and  there  that 
comes  to  perfect  issue. 

In  the  animal  kingdom,  nearer  to  ourselves, 
and  where  our  sympathies  in  a  sort  can  reach, 
the  ruin  and  death  of  the  unfit  is  that  which  op- 
presses one,  rather  than  the  survival  of,  here  and 
there,  one  fitting. 

Air,  earth,  and  sea  are  alike  slaughter-houses. 
Of  the  millions  of  incipient  living  forms  in  any,  it 
is  but  here  and  there  one  that  attains  tliQ  prophecy 
of  its  beginning.  The  arrowy  deaths,  hungry 
and  fierce,  dart  through  the  flying  sea-foam,  only 
to  be  pursued  themselves  by  deaths  more  terri- 
ble, swifter  of  sweep,  more  ravenous  and  strong. 

We  accept   all   this   under   the   name   of   "the 


TEMPTED. 


8S 


survival  of  the  fittest,"  and  make  no  complaint. 
Indeed,  it  is  justified  under  the  purpose  of  the 
attainment  of  a  higher  good.  At  all  events, 
whether  we  justify  it  or  not,  consider  it  benefi- 
cent or  not,  it  is  the  fact  that  everything  we 
know  that  lives,  animal  or  vegetable,  is  at  once, 
upon  finding  itself  differentiated  into  individual- 
ity, put  to  trial.  Enemies  are  round  it  to  afifiict 
it  with  stress  and  strain,  and  its  fibre  is  tested,  its 
power  to  stand,  its  right  to  exist  and  come  to  its 
full  purpose.  There  is  no  malignancy  in  the 
powers  that  test  it,  either,  so  far.  The  storm  that 
tests  the  roots,  stock,  and  grain  of  the  young  oak 
has  no  ill-will  to  the  oak.  The  whale  who  de- 
vours ten  thousand  living  things  at  a  mouthful 
does  not  hate  the  mackerel.  Indeed,  the  whale 
loves  the  mackerel ! 

In  fact,  this  so-called  Law  of  the  survival  of  the 
fittest  is  the  optimistic  form  of  stating  the  very 
dark  and  mysterious  fact  that  this  is  a  world  of 
deadly  wrestle,  of  battle  to  the  death,  which 
battle  and  wrestle  sift  out,  by  trial  and  most  in- 
exorable test,  that  which  has  not  the  fibre,  the 
courage,  the  strength  or  the  prudence  to  entitle 
it  to  be.  The  process  in  some  of  its  forms  is  a 
horrible  and  apparently  cruel  one.  We  try  to 
say,  "  In  the  long  run  it  is  the  best.     The  law  is 


86  TEMPTED. 

really  beneficent.  Nature  mercifully  sweeps  her 
failures  into  the  dust-bin  of  things  forgotten. 
She  is  forever  aspiring,  looking  upward,  strug- 
gling toward  better  things,  toward  a  dimly-seen 
ideal  she  has  never  won,  and  she  is  pitiless  of 
what  stands  in  her  way.  Her  weak,  foolish,  lazy, 
helpless  things  must  perish  that  her  best  ideal  so 
far  may  live." 

The  statement  of  the  law,  however,  was  made 
long  ago,  in  a  higher  realm  and  on  another  plane 
of  God's  worlds.  I  suppose  myself  it  exists  as  a 
fact  here,  because  it  exists  as  an  eternal  fact  in 
the  world  of  which  this  is  the  shadow.  I  mean 
exactly  what  I  say.  To  me  this  world  is  only 
the  shadow  cast  into  time  of  the  eternal  world, 
which  is  substance  and  reality.  We  are,  even  by 
our  materialism  and  through  our  imagined  ma- 
terialistic science,  drifting  away  fast,  as  all  real 
thinkers  are  seeing,  into  the  glooms  and  grand- 
eurs of  the  spiritual. 

They  have  left  us,  you  know,  no  matter  any 
more.  That  is  relegated  to  the  crude  fancies  of 
ignorance.  We  have  nothing  now  but  appear- 
ances. Somewhere,  it  is  possible,  lies  a  sub- 
stance, a  substratum,  a  real  background,  on 
which  phenomena  display  themselves  and  flicker 
and  fade  like  the  colors  in  a  kaleidoscope.     But 


TEMPTED.  87 

about  that  we  can  learn  nothing,  we  are  told, 
from  the  phenomena.  Only  the  pJienomaia  and 
the  noumena  remain — the  appearances  before  our 
eyes,  the  thoughts  about  them  in  our  own  facul- 
ties. Firm-rooted  earth,  sun,  stars,  and  deeps, 
where  earths  and  suns  and  stars  are  born,  are  the 
shifting  shadows  of  a  dream,  which  exist  only  in 
the  thought  of  the  dreamer. 
Curious  that 

' '  The  mitred  saint  of  Cloyne  " 

should  avenge  himself  on  the  sneers  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  by  mastering  the  materialism  of 
the  nineteenth,  and  that  the  hardest,  baldest,  and 
apparently  barest  of  all  philosophies  of  matter 
should  turn  Berkelyan  in  its  last  analysis,  and 
declare  with  him  that  nothing  exists,  in  this  world, 
of  real  but  only  of  seeming! 

I  take  it  all  processes  which  we  observe  here, 
and  which,  seeing  them  occur  continually  in  the 
same  connections,  we  call  ''  Laws,"  do  so  occur 
because  they  are  reflections  cast  into  time,  into 
phenomena,  of  processes  eternally  needful  and 
necessary  in  the  real  world,  of  which  the  phe- 
nomenal world  is  the  more  or  less  faint  expres- 
sion. 

Bishop  Butler's  argument  from  Analogy  rests 
on  a  more  unassailable  basis  than  even  so  deep  a 


88  TEMPTED. 

thinker  perhaps  himself  perceived.  On  the  unity 
of  Law,  namely,  that  is,  that  the  visible  and  in- 
visible, if  they  exist  at  all,  must  be  correlative, 
and  the  material  express  the  spiritual.  He  is  an 
instance  of  that  which  may  encourage  us  all,  that 
any  clear  and  true  thinking  deals  not  alone  with 
passing  phases  of  opinion,  though  it  may  set 
itself  purposely  so  to  do,  but  must  be  valuable 
and  permanent  when  such  passing  phases  are 
forgotten,  because  it  has  gotten  grasp  upon 
truths  eternal. 

What  shall  I  say  then  ?  I  am  not  here  to  dog- 
matize. I  seek  but  to  suggest.  Is  it  the  eternal 
Law,  then,  that  all  things  created  must  be  tried  ? 
You  may  call  it  "tempted,"  but  tempting  and 
trying  are  all  one  when  you  speak  of  the  moral 
and  the  spiritual,  of  any  creature  that  says  "  L" 
Is  it  that  the  existences  spiritual  which  have  been 
tried  and  have  been  ruined  in  the  trial,  must 
necessarily  be  swept  into  the  dust-bin  and  rub- 
bish-heap of  a  universe  that  has  no  place  nor  use 
for  its  own  failures  ?  Do  we  call  such  dust-bin 
and  rubbish-hole  "Hell,"  and  must  "the  con- 
suming fire  "  be  the  best  sanitary  method  of  dis- 
posing of  angels  or  men  who  are  failures,  who 
could  not  survive  in  a  universe,  inexorable  and 
pitiless    in    its    demand    for   growth,    and    right 


TEMPTED.  89 

growth  and  strong  growth  in  the  beings,  in  all  its 
worlds,  which  say  "  I  ?  " 

Let  us  turn  to  facts  which  face  us. 

As  the  world  in  which  we  live  is  a  sifting  and 
winnowing  world,  a  testing,  trying,  proving  world 
in  its  efforts  to  better  the  things  within  it,  physi- 
cally, so  also  is  it  a  world  to  test  and  try  and 
tempt,  that  it  may  educate,  select,  and  better  its 
growths  spiritual. 

Explain  the  fact  as  you  may,  the  fact  exists 
that  there  is  a  moral  and  spiritual,  as  well  as  a 
natural  selection  in  the  world,  a  moral  and  spir- 
itual "survival  of  the  fittest"  and  destruction  of 
the  unfittest. 

Races  perish,  not  from  physical  but  moral  fail- 
ure. Nations  disappear  unfit  to  survive,  with  all 
physical  resources  in  their  favor,  from  purely 
moral  unfitness.  Families,  stalwart,  healthy, 
courageous  in  all  that  belongs  to  physical  power 
of  survival,  have  perished  from  moral  weakness, 
unfit  to  be. 

It  is  a  phenomenon  common  in  all  ages  and 
lands.  The  survival  of  the  fittest,  when  you 
come  to  men,  changes  its  face  and  takes  in  moral 
strength  and  spiritual  fibre,  demands  something 
altogether  different  from  the  speed  of  the  horse, 
the  courage  of  the  lion,  the  cunning  of  the  fox, 


9©  TEMPTED. 

if  men  are  to  survive.  Reverence,  steadfastness, 
truth,  fortitude,  patience,  loyalty — a  whole  array 
of  qualities  which  belong  purely  to  the  spiritual 
side  of  the  nature,  are  those  which  secure  the 
existence  and  continuance  of  families,  races,  and 
nations  of  men. 

In  the  struggle  for  existence  among  animals 
only  the  animal  qualities  are  tried.  There  is  no 
temptation  possible  for  them,  in  the  sense  that 
they  are  put  to  moral  test  or  strain. 

In  the  man's  case  the  struggle  for  existence 
becomes  a  moral  struggle,  and  the  more  he  be- 
comes differentiated,  as  a  man,  the  more  entirely 
human  he  becomes,  the  more  markedly  is  he 
tried  in  his  moral  fibre  and  tested  in  his  moral 
make-up,  the  more,  that  is,  he  becomes  tempted 
and  has  to  resist  temptation. 

Now,  if  moral  growth  be  under  the  same  law 
and  conditions  as  physical  growth  (and  Our 
Lord  commits  us  to  that  as  do  the  philosophers), 
then  this  world,  to  be  a  school  for  moral  training, 
must  be  a  rude,  unfinished,  tempting,  and  mis- 
leading world.  If  we  grow  by  resistance  and 
prove  our  right  to  be  by  our  power  to  hold  our 
own,  to  exist,  then  there  is,  as  far  as  we  can  see, 
nothing  else  possible  except  a  world  where  we 
are  not   only  tried,   but  even,  in   ethical  sense, 


TEMPTED.  91 

tempted.  The  large  possibilities  of  failure  must 
be  accepted,  the  large  margin  for  ruin  must  be 
admitted,  and  still  we  must  somehow  hold  to  the 
faith  that  the  arrangement  is  beneficent. 

Of  course  now  the  evil  becomes  moral  evil. 
The  trial  ceases  to  be  a  mere  unmoral  trial  of 
power — it  becomes  a  malignant  temptation,  a  spir- 
itual force  put  forth  to  overcome,  to  mislead  and 
delude. 

The  world  is  so  tempting  from  its  own  appar- 
ent constitution  and  our  own  relations  to  it,  mis- 
leads and  seduces  the  moral  nature  so  strongly, 
that  I  am  not  surprised  that  many  people  are 
prepared  to  say  there  is  no  other  tempter  but 
the  world  and  the  flesh. 

And  yet  here  there  comes  to  meet  us  a  power 
of  evil,  purely  spiritual,  an  impersonation  of 
temptation  to  which  the  Son  of  God  is  deliber- 
ately exposed — "tempted  of  the  Devil." 

I  cannot  make  the  Diabolos  here  a  figure  of 
speech.  My  philosophy  compels  me  to  accept  a 
world  of  Evil  as  well  as  a  world  of  Good.  There 
must  be,  if  there  be  an  invisible  world  at  all, 
powers  in  it,  and  activities  to  answer  to  the  dark 
cruelties  and  malignities  of  this.  If  the  phe- 
nomenal world  be  an  expression  of  the  real  world 
of  which  it  is  phenomenal,  then  evil  is  there,  and 


92  TEMPTED. 

reveals  itself  here.  And  as  I  know  and  can  con- 
ceive of  no  force  except  as  the  manifestation  of 
a  personal  Will,  as  no  other  force  is  "  thinkable  " 
to  any  man,  so  the  manifestation  of  Evil  requires 
my  assent  to  an  Evil  Will  somewhere,  and  an 
Evil  Person  or  persons. 

Besides,  I  have  a  profound  reverence  for  human 
nature,  and  I  do  not  believe  it  is  diabolic.  I  also 
do  not  believe  the  world  is  diabolic.  But  there 
are  some  things  men  do  so  absolutely  diabolic, 
so  devilishly  cruel  and  malignant  and  hateful, 
that  out  of  respect  for  human  nature  I  am  com- 
pelled to  use  the  reverent  form  of  the  old  Com- 
mon Law  indictments  and  say  that  the  man 
guilty  of  such  deeds  was  "  instigated  by  the 
Devil."  A  decent  regard  for  my  own  nature 
compels  me  to  believe  there  is  a  personal  devil, 
legions  of  them  indeed.  For  I  will  not  say  that 
men  are  devils,  and  yet  I  must  account  for  devil- 
ish deeds! 

But  the  Devil  is  not  Master,  but  Servant.  His 
power  must  necessarily  be  very  limited.  He  is  a 
will  and  a  person,  but  you  and  I  are  wills  and 
persons  also,  and  are,  I  hope,  a  good  deal  stronger 
and  braver  than  he.  He  appears  to  be  used  by 
the  Almighty  as  a  servant,  to  apply  the  tests  to 
the  Sons  of  God  to  reveal  their  character  and 


TEMPTED.  .   93 

expose  their  flaws.  He  must  somewhere  have 
been  an  enormous  failure  himself ;  indeed,  we  are 
assured  he  was.  But  the  wisdom  of  our  Father 
in  Heaven  puts  even  failures  to  use,  it  seems,  and 
it  looks  somewhat  as  if  the  Devil  had  been  made 
a  sort  of  uncouth  slave  to  help  in  the  training  of 
His  Sons. 

We  need  have  no  reverence  for  the  Devil,  of 
course,  and  in  fact  it  is  not  worth  while  having 
even  much  respect  for  him.  Martin  Luther  called 
him  ''  God's  monkey,"  and  flung  his  inkstand  at 
him,  and  it  is  quite  possible  Martin  was  not  so 
far  wrong.  Of  course  we  all  understand  that  the 
Satan  of  John  Milton  has  no  existence  outside  of 
Paradise  Lost.  His  grand  and  gloomy  dignities 
exist  only  in  the  vast  imagination  of  the  great 
Poet. 

In  the  revelation  of  human  position  in  the  wil- 
derness the  Diabolos  literally  acts  the  slanderer, 
as  we  shall  find.  He  gathers  up  all  the  false- 
hoods and  cheats  which  the  material  puts  upon 
the  spiritual  and  gives  them  spiritual  voice.  He 
puts  himself,  as  the  depraved  spiritual  always 
does,  on  the  side  of  the  material.  He  denies  the 
real  and  asserts  the  phenomenal,  and  as  it  seems 
to  me,  is  deceived  himself.  He  has  lost  spiritual 
insight  and  views  things  from   the  outside.      He 


94   .  TEMPTED, 

argues  upon  appearances  and  realities  have  be- 
come a  shadow. 

One  might  ask  in  wonder,  if  the  ultimate  ruin 
of  a  spiritual  personality  be  not  just  this,  that  it 
is  banished  from  the  real  world  into  the  phe- 
nomenal, has  itself  lost  its  own  spiritual  reality 
and  become  itself  a  phenomenon  ?  The  truth  of 
things  has  become  impossible!  It  lives  among 
the  lies  of  things,  the  shadows  and  pretenses  of 
things!  It  has  become  a  liar  itself  and,  in  the 
case  of  a  high  spiritual  dignity  lost,  "  the  Father 
of  lies!  " 

We  are  necessarily  reaching  toward  one  con- 
clusion here,  whether  we  can  unders*:and  it  or 
not.  It  will  go  out  in  mystery  as  all  things  go, 
and  it  Avill  be  hard,  it  may  be,  and  may  look  even 
cruel.  It  cannot  be  helped.  If  we  are  Sons  of 
God,  we  men,  we  must  be  put  to  the  test. 

Indeed,  long  ago  the  Prophet  proclaimed  of 
the  eternal  Son  of  God, 

"  He  shall  sit  as  a  refiner  and  purifier  of  silver. 
He  shall  purge  the  sons  of  Levi. 
As  gold  and  silver  are  tried." 

If  we  are  the  Sons  of  God  we  must  be  trained. 
There  is  no  training  physically  that  does  not  in- 
volve the  possibility  of  destruction.      I  ask  hum- 


TEMPTED. 


95 


bly,   I  ask  even    fearfully,  is  there  any  spiritual 
training  that  does  not  involve  the  same  ? 

But  one  will  say,  "  Why  did  not  God  make  us 
without  the  necessity  of  such  training  and  such 
possible  waste  and  loss  ?  "  I  can  only  say,  Why 
did  He  not  make  the  world  perfect  at  the  begin- 
ning? Why  did  He  not  make  His  universe  other 
than  it  is  ? 

We  have  seen  that  the  world  in  which  we  find 
ourselves,  even  for  the  creatures  of  its  own,  is  a 
world  of  struggle,  of  trial,  of  wrestle  and  strain, 
of  splendid  survival  and  innumerable  failure. 

If  now  God  lead  up  His  own  children — those 
whom  He  has  made  in  His  own  image,  and 
breathed  into  them  the  breath  of  the  intellectual 
life  and  the  spiritual  life — the  two  lives  that 
make  them  "  living  souls  "  and  so  differentiates 
them  forever  from  all  other  organized  things — if 
He  lead  them  up  into  this  wilderness,  I  say  shall 
we  be  astonished  at  finding  them  under  its  con- 
ditions subject  necessarily  to  its  arrangements  ? 

Is  it  not  rational  to  infer  that  they  are  fitted 
exactly  to  such  a  world,  and  such  a  world  to 
them  ?  That  they  also  are  to  grow  by  strain 
and  stress  of  temptation  and  trial,  that  the  uni- 
versal law,  that   resistance  is  the  method  of  ad- 


g6  TEMPTED. 

vancc,  shall  be  found  reigning  here  in  things  spir- 
itual as  it  reigns  in  things  phenomenal  ? 

And  it  does  not  change  the  law  that  myriads 
of  the  children  of  our  race  are  spared  this  trial. 
The  majority  of  those  born  into  the  wilderness 
are  taken  out  of  it  before  temptation  begins. 

There  is  no  sense  in  this  if  we  look  at  our 
"science"  only.  The  death  of  infants  is  abso- 
lutely irrational  in  the  face  of  the  law  of  survival 
if  we  confine  that  law  only  to  time  and  the  world. 
I  dare  say  there  is  nothing  more  preposterously 
senseless  than  the  death,  at  a  year  old,  of  a  child 
who,  in  head  and  hand,  in  health  and  intellect, 
was  the  perfect  flower  of  his  race !  But  the 
Great  Father  has  other  schools  besides  this.  He 
is  not  confined  to  one  curriculum  for  the  train- 
ing of  His  sons,  and  those  He  takes  away  need 
other  discipline  than  this  wilderness  affords.  He 
trains  some  here.     He  need  not  train  all. 

When  we  look  at  the  growth  and  training  of 
the  races  and  nations  of  the  earth — of  men  in  the 
mass,  we  find  the  experience  invariable.  Out  of 
obscure  conditions,  out  of  sore  pain,  and  sordid 
toil,  and  hard  living,  out  of  savagery  and  igno- 
rance, out  of  battles  without  and  battles  within, 
out  of  writhings  in  the  dust  and  struggling  to 
the   feet  again   for  a  few  more  staggering  steps 


TEMPTED. 


97 


onward,  out  of  wretchedness  and  poverty,  out 
of  distress  and  imminent  ruin,  the  great  races 
and  peoples  of  the  earth  have  fought  their  way 
into  Hght  and  freedom. 

All  along  they  were  tempted.  There  was  the 
suggestion  at  every  step  to  cease  the  struggle, 
to  shun  the  pain,  to  sit  down  content  in  slavery, 
to  eat  and  drink  and  enjoy,  as  well  as  one  might, 
whatever  was  at  hand,  and  let  principle  go,  and 
steadfastness,  and  manliness,  and  accept  "peace 
at  any  price  "  with  injustice  and  wrong. 

The  nations  that  have  failed  yielded  to  the 
temptation.  The  peoples  that  are  to-day  slaves 
and  degraded  fell  before  the  Tempter.  In  every 
case,  I  think,  if  we  knew  the  facts,  we  would  find 
it  so. 

The  nations  that  have  not  failed,  the  peoples 
who  stand  upon  the  heights  of  Time  to-day,  the 
Masters  of  the  world  and  of  themselves,  are  the 
peoples  who  have  resisted  the  temptation  of  the 
wilderness,  who  have  stood,  consciously  or  un- 
consciously, upon  the  conviction  that  they  were 
not  children  of  the  wilderness,  but  Sons  of  God 
and  children  of  the  light,  that  their  descent  was 
royal  and  their  ancestors  heroes  and  demigods, 
and  that  they  were  here  to  master  the  wilderness 
and  drive  the  haunting  demons  from  all  its  shad- 


c,8  ■      *  TEMPTED. 

owy  valleys,  the  brute  beasts  from  all  its  moun- 
tain-caves! 

Let  us  tabulate,  if  we  will,  the  rate  of  national 
progress,  let  us  say,  of  our  own  race,  from  the 
savagery  of  the  German  forests  to  the  civilization 
of  London  and  New  York.  Let  us  show,  step  by 
step,  the  development  and  find  the  law  of  evolu- 
tion if  we  can.  But  if  we  be  true  thinkers  and 
philosophers,  let  us  not  fail  to  take  this  fact  into 
the  account  and  give  it  the  enormous  importance 
it  holds,  that  from  the  dawn  of  its  history  this 
race  has  held  itself  sprung  from  the  Powers  Di- 
vine, that  our  heathen  forefathers  believed  them- 
selves children  of  the  yEsir,  the  breed  and  blood 
of  All-Father  Odin,  and  that  their  Christian  de- 
scendants have  been  taught,  from  their  cradles, 
that  they  are  the  children  of  Almighty  God,  and 
in  the  name  of  the  Elder  Brother,  "  God  and  Man, 
in  one  Person  Jesus  Christ,"  have  the  right  to 
claim  the  birthright ! 

Surely  it  would  be  a  poor  philosophy  of  his- 
tory that  would  leave  out,  in  accounting  for  the 
tremendous  victories  of  the  race,  for  all  the  light 
and  leading  that  has  put  it,  strong  and  free  and 
mighty,  as  the  torch-bearer  of  Time,  such  a  blood- 
born,  innate  conviction  as  this,  dominating  it  for 
fifty  generations! 


TEMPTED.  9g 

And  looking  back  upon  the  past  we  can  see 
that,  in  every  century  of  its  history,  this  race  has 
been  upon  trial.  In  plain  English,  it  has  been 
tempted  and  so  tried.  And  the  temptations  have 
come  most  surely  to  it  when  faint  and  hungry 
in  the  wilderness.  It  has  grown  by  being  sifted. 
It  has  become  clearer  in  its  own  convictions  by 
being  tempted.  It  has,  as  one  of  its  own  Poets 
has  sung,  learned  well  "  how  sublime  a  thing  it  is 
to  suffer  and  be  strong." 

It  has  been  by  no  means  blameless  in  its  his- 
tory, by  no  means  always  conscious  of  its  own 
high  purposes.  But  this  it  always  has  held  in  its 
worst  estate,  some  dim  conviction  of  its  high 
calling  as  allied  to  the  Highest,  as  sharing  a  di- 
vine life  and  purpose,  and  so  not  of  the  wilder- 
ness utterly. 

I  think  it  no  open  question  that,  for  the  ends 
of  freedom  and  earth-mastery  and  high  service  to 
God  and  man,  there  is  no  attainment  possible  by 
any  people,  except  through  some  such  tempta- 
tion and  pain.  There  is  no  case  on  record  where 
a  race  has  been  given  freedom  and  self-mastery 
and  has  retained  them.  It  must  itself  have  con- 
quered them,  deserved  them,  earned  them,  by 
victory  in  the  long  trial  of  the  wilderness. 

And,  moreover,  that  victory  has   been   never 


lOO  TEMPTED. 

won  by  any  people,  in  any  age,  save  by  one  who 
has  had  the  profound  conviction  that,  in  some 
sense  or  other,  it  was  a  people  with  a  divine  con- 
nection and  a  spiritual  purpose,  a  race,  in  some 
sense,  of  the  Sons  of  God. 

The  past  of  the  world  becomes  luminous,  in 
this  view  of  the  Law,  with  a  divine  purpose.  It 
is  a  past  filled  with  sorrow  and  shame.  The 
leaves  of  its  story  are  stained  with  blood  and 
tears.  That  story  is  a  record  of  robbery,  cruelty, 
and  merciless  slaughter.  The  soul  grows  dark 
in  the  shadow  of  the  world's  wrongs,  and  with 
the  Prophet  cries — "How  long!  O  Lord,  how 
long!"  Must  this  be  the  story  to  the  end?  Is 
man  to  be  forever  the  prey  of  man  ? 

And  one  turns  to  the  wilderness,  and  the  light 
that  overhangs  the  Syrian  sands,  where  the  Eter- 
nal Son  is  in  warfare  for  His  own,  and  cries,  "  In 
these  wild  ways  the  nations  are  builded  who  must 
save  the  world.  Out  of  all  this  sorrow  come  the 
crowned  and  sceptred  peoples  who  have  stood 
upon  their  sonship  toward  God,  their  kinship  to 
light,  their  hatred  of  darkness,  their  faith  in  ever- 
lasting righteousness,  their  trust  in  God  and 
Man." 

Others  have  disappeared  in  the  darkness.  They 
failed  and  surrendered  to  the  tempter  and  the 


TEMPTED.  loi 

temptation.  These  come  forth  into  the  day 
dawn,  the  sunrise  upon  their  crests.  They  are 
scarred  and  worn.  They  are  blood-stained  and 
dust-covered  from  the  terrible  wrestle.  These 
are  they  who  survive  from  that  grim  battle  of 
the  West — the  shadowy  type  of  all  the  rest — 

"Where  all  King  Arthur's  table,  man  by  man 
Had  fallen  in  I>yonnesse  about  their  Lord." 

From  the  bloody  days  at  Tours  when  the 
Frank  hammer  beat  back  the  power  of  Islam, 
from  the  day  of  Senlac  when  Harold  fell,  from 
Marston  Moor  and  Naseby,  from  the  hunger  and 
the  nakedness  of  Valley  Forge,  from  the  long  en- 
durance of  Waterloo,  from  the  iron  hail  of  Chicka- 
mauga,  they  emerge  crowned  and  free  and  strong, 
because  they  faced  the  trial  like  men,  and  be- 
lieved that  "  man  doth  not  live  by  bread  only, 
but  by  every  word  that  proceedeth  out  of  the 
mouth  of  God." 

Let  us  turn  to  the  training  of  individual  men 
upon  the  earth  without  reference  to  their  spir- 
itual, but  solely  to  their  physical  and  intellectual 
character. 

There  is  temptation,  trial,  risk  at  every  turn. 
You  must  train  your  son  physically.  You  wish 
to   make  a  strong,  healthy,  symmetrical  man  of 


102  TEMPTED. 

him.  You  cannot  do  it  by  packing  him  in  cotton- 
wool and  putting  him  away  in  a  bandbox.  To 
be  sure,  by  that  process  you  would  save  all  risk 
of  breaking  a  bone  in  his  body  or  getting  a  scar 
on  his  flesh.  But  you  are  also  very  certain  you 
could  never  in  that  way  make  a  physical  man  of 
him. 

So  you  deliberately  expose  the  boy  to  "  every- 
thing out  of  doors."  You  let  him  face  the  sun's 
heat,  the  rain,  the  snow,  the  storm.  You  en- 
courage him  to  all  boyish  activities.  You  drive 
him  from  the  fireside  if  need  be.  You  know  per- 
fectly well  you  are  at  least  risking  his  taking 
cold.  You  are  challenging  croup,  pneumonia,  and 
catarrh.  You  do  the  best  you  can  for  him, 
clothe  him  warmly,  watch  over  him  carefully, 
push  him  out  and  let  him  take  the  risks. 

He  climbs  a  tree.  All  boys  that  amount  to 
much  do  that.  It  may  some  time  be  a  very 
necessary  accomplishment,  as,  for  instance,  should 
he  be  hunting  Grizzlies  in  California,  and  the 
Grizzly  take  a  notion  to  hunt  him  !  But  he  risks 
a  fall  always  in  climbing.  He  may  break  a  leg 
or  an  arm !  You  accept  that,  and  if  you  are 
sensible,  allow  him  and  even  encourage  him  to 
climb.  Of  course,  you  are  anxious.  That  goes 
without  saying,  and  you  watch  him. 


TEMPTED. 


103 


You  wish  to  give  him  gymnastic  training. 
Now,  a  considerable  ratio  of  boys  break  their 
bones  or  strain  themselves  seriously  in  these  ex- 
ercises.    You  expose  him  to  the  risk. 

He  ought  to  learn  to  ride  a  horse.  Every 
American  boy  ought  to  learn.  You  wish  him  to 
be  a  free,  bold  rider.  Of  course  you  advise  him 
and  instruct  him  and  begin  his  lessons  with  a 
well-broken,  gentle  horse.  At  the  same  time  you 
deliberately  expose  him  to  the  risk  of  being 
thrown  and  having  his  neck  broken. 

It  is  desirable  he  should  learn  to  swim.  He 
will  never  learn  to  swim  after  the  good  old  lady's 
formula,  "Yes,  my  dear,  of  course  you  must 
learn  to  swim,  but  don't  go  near  the  water." 
You  accept  the  possibility  of  the  boy's  'being 
drowned,  if  you  insist,  as  I  think  you  ought,  on 
his  learning  to  swim. 

Let  it  be  what  it  will  that  you  wish  to  train 
him  in  for  development  of  his  physical  powers, 
and  you  expose  him  to  injury  and  possible 
death.  To  handle  a  boat,  to  use  a  gun  (and  that 
is  a  desirable  part  of  every  American  boy's  edu- 
cation, in  my  judgment),  to  run,  to  leap,  to  play 
in  any  athletic  game  is  to  take  risks,  risks  of  seri- 
ous injury,  even  risks  of  life  itself. 

Yet  a  wise  parent  will  deliberately  expose  his 


I04  TEMPTED. 

son,  and  encourage  him  to  expose  himself,  to 
accept  the  risks  with  deHberation  and  forethought 
for  the  advantages  to  be  obtained. 

Indeed,  life  is  so  organized  that  these  risks 
cannot  be  shunned  in  any  case.  The  mechanic, 
the  engineer,  the  brakeman,  the  man  laying  brick 
on  the  wall,  the  other  putting  slates  upon  the 
roof,  the  sailor  on  the  yard-arm  in  an  Atlantic 
gale,  and  the  farmer  driving  his  reaper,  are  all 
meeting  risks  which  cost  a  certain  number  of 
men  every  year  limbs  and  life. 

If  we  would  escape  absolutely  from  risk,  the 
world's  business  would  come  to  an  end.  No 
man  should  venture  out  of  doors.  But  even  the 
house  would  be  no  security  in  a  cyclone!  He 
would  be  reduced  to  burrow  in  the  earth.  Every 
activity  of  life  involves  risk.  The  greater  the 
activities  the  greater  the  risk.  The  civilized  man 
accepts  an  hundred  risks  the  savage  shuns. 

But  these  are  physical  and  personal  risks. 
There  are  others,  perhaps  more  serious,  which 
face  us  in  all  movements  of  business  and  the 
combined  activities  of  men. 

A  certain  number  of  mercantile  failures  occur 
every  year.  No  man  enters  upon  such  business 
without  taking  his  risk  of  failure.  A  certain 
number  of  banks  fail  every  year.    I  am  not  aware 


TEMPTED.  105 

that  the  fact  prevents  any  of  us  who  are  fortu- 
nate enough  to  have  any  money  from  depositing 
it  in  a  bank,  and  I  think  none  of  us  would  refuse 
a  few  shares  in  such  an  institution,  although  we 
are  quite  aware  that  cashiers,  and  even  presidents, 
do  cross  into  Canada  and  leave  the  stockholders 
to  settle  matters  with  the  depositors! 

Let  us  get  distinctly  before  us  the  fact  that 
the  training  begun  in  infancy  never  ends  in  this 
world.  It  is  a  training  in  foresight,  in  prudence, 
in  strength,  patience,  and  courage,  a  training 
which  necessarily  demands  at  every  moment  risk, 
and  even  fatal  risk. 

If  these  things  be  desirable  at  all,  we  see  no 
way  to  get  them  except  in  the  way  of  trying  the 
man,  of  having  ruin  and  failure  watching  on  his 
footsteps,  of  holding  him  at  every  moment  in 
peril  of  these. 

There  are  exceptions  now  and  then  in  certain 
exceptional  lives.  But  exceptions  prove  the 
rule.  The  law  is  that  a  man  lives  and  does  his 
work  with  risk  of  destruction  to  it,  to  himself  or 
to  both,  on  either  hand,  and  he  is  bound  at  his 
peril  to  use  all  his  best  powers  to  preserve  him- 
self. 

But,  you  say,  thece  are  only  risks.  What  about 
temptation  ?     I  answer,  the  risk  comes  from  the 


lo6  TEMPTED. 

temptation.  The  temptations  to  indulgence,  to 
laziness,  to  shun  trouble,  to  enjoy  the  day,  to 
take  the  easy  side,  not  the  hard  one,  to  end 
trouble  by  hasty  and  unconsidered  action — some 
such  temptation  makes  the  risk  in  most  cases. 
The  basis  of  all  trial,  if  you  examine  closely,  you 
will  find  to  be  a  temptation.  It  is  a  great 
temptation,  too  often  yielded  to,  for  instance,  to 
use  a  boiler  with  a  rotten  bit  of  iron  in  it  just 
07ie  day  more.  "  It  has  worked  so  far.  It  will 
work  a  day  more.  We  will  accept  the  risk.  We 
have  no  time  now  to  attend  to  it."  There  are  a 
large  number  of  graves  in  the  various  cemete- 
ries of  the  country  which  owe  their  existence  to 
the  yielding  to  this  temptation !  Indeed,  this 
temptation  is  the  root  and  heart  of  all,  I  think, 
the  temptation  to  take  a  lie  for  a  truth,  a  sham 
for  a  reality,  a  rotten  boiler  for  a  sound  one,  and 
imagine  the  lie,  the  sham,  the  rotten  boiler,  will 
answer  for  this  occasion  at  least,  or  this  day! 

In  a  world  like  this,  there  is  but  one  end  for  a 
man  or  a  people  who  take  a  course  like  that. 

But  to  return  to  our  boy  again.  I  have  spoken 
of  the  way  his  father  must  train  him  physically. 

It  is  under  the  same  conditions  precisely  in 
which  he  must  train  him  intellectually.  Chil- 
dren's brains  have  given  way  under  the  studies 


TEMPTED.  1C7 

which  were  meant  to  strengthen  them.  An  ap- 
plication too  intense  or  long  continued,  or  nar- 
rowed to  one  subject,  has  weakened  more  than 
one  growing  intelligence,  or  lamed  it  for  life. 
Perhaps  the  risk  here  is  not  so  pressing,  and  the 
examples  are  fewer,  than  in  the  case  of  physical 
exercise  and  physical  injury.  And  I  fancy  I 
need  not  lift  a  voice  of  warning  to  the  members 
of  this  University,  as  if  it  were  an  anxious  matter 
on  tJicir  account ! 

Still,  there  is  the  risk  even  in  the  University  of 
Michigan !  At  all  events,  the  head  will  ache,  the 
eyes  will  grow  weak,  the  brain  will  be  confused, 
anxiety  and  sleeplessness  will  come,  where  there 
is  hard  study  and  earnest  seeking  after  knowl- 
edge. The  price  must  be  paid  for  the  gains  we 
make.  The  body  neglected  will  avenge  itself, 
and  scarce  any  man  devotes  himself  to  an  intel- 
lectual pursuit,  with  the  consuming  energy  which 
high  excellence  demands,  without  paying  the 
penalty  in  some  weakness  of  the  body.  Great 
scholars  are  not  often  robust  men.  Often  they 
have  been  the  victims  of  pain  and  sickness  for 
the  whole  course  of  their  lives. 

But  what  father  who  launches  his  son  on  the 
career  of  high  intellectual  culture,  and  dreams 
splendid   dreams  of  wisdom   attained,  and  high 


Io8  TEMPTED. 

trophies  gained  for  human  enrichment,  by  one 
who  bears  his  name  and  honors  it,  ever  hesitates 
on  that  account  ?  He  takes  the  risks  for  the  son 
he  loves  as  himself.  He  exposes  him  to  such 
risks,  and  encourages  him  to  expose  himself. 

And  the  son  himself  faces  and  accepts  the 
same  risks,  if  the  root  of  the  matter  be  in  him. 
All  the  warnings  of  well-meaning  advisers,  all 
the  experience  of  the  past  have  no  weight  with 
him.  Having  made  up  his  mind  to  his  career, 
pressed  by  the  sacred  hunger  and  thirst  of  knowl- 
edge, he  accepts  the  risks  of  weakened  body  and 
aching  head  and  lost  muscle  for  the  sake  of  the 
high  purpose  he  holds  before  him. 

But  a  larger  responsibility  yet  rests  upon  the 
Father  in  the  moral  training  of  the  child.  If  we 
find  a  difBculty  in  the  fact  that  God  leads  His 
children  into  the  wilderness  to  be  tempted  of  the 
Devil,  let  us  remember  that  we  find  the  same 
difficulty  in  the  dealings  of  earthly  fathers  with 
earthly  sons,  and  that  we  ourselves  who  are 
fathers  have  not  hesitated  and  do  not  hesitate, 
in  our  weakness  and  blindness,  to  do  this  very 
thing  which  we  find  so  strange  in  the  All-wise 
Father  of  Men. 

The  son  has  been  carefully  guarded  and  taught 
under  the  roof-tree  of  home.     He  has  been  anx- 


TEMPTED.  109 

iously  shielded  from  contact  with  evil,  even  from 
knowledge  of  evil.  His  associates  have  been 
chosen  with  care.  His  going  out  and  coming  in 
have  been  guarded.  It  might  seem  well  if  it 
could  be  always  so.  The  mother  generally  feels 
that  it  would  be,  and  very  naturally. 

Still,  the  time  must  come  when  these  home- 
guards  must  all  pass  out  of  his  life.  The  child 
must  become  a  man.  He  must  learn  to  stand 
upon  his  own  feet  and  bear  his  own  burdens  and 
answer  for  himself.  The  crisis  comes  to  every 
most  carefully  sheltered  boy. 

He  must  leave  home;  he  must  go  to  the  great 
School  or  to  the  great  City.  The  father  delib- 
erately sends  him  to  the  one  or  the  other,  know- 
ing, as  the  son  cannot  know,  the  enormous  moral 
risks  he  is  running,  the  fearful  temptations  to 
which  he  exposes  him. 

It  is  a  tremendous  responsibility,  but  a  part  of 
the  natural  responsibility  of  fatherhood.  And 
the  wise  father  knows  there  is  no  other  way  in 
which  the  boy  can  be  trained  into  a  self-reliant, 
high-principled  man.  He  must  eat  of  the  fruit 
of  the  tree  of  knowledge.  He  must  know  good 
and  evil.  He  must  learn  to  stand  by  the  right 
for  its  own  sake.  He  must  meet  temptation  and 
resist  it  and  grow  stronger    by  resistance.      So 


no  TEMPTED. 

only  does  moral  manhood  grow.  So  only  is  soul 
culture  possible.  As  in  all  else,  so  also  in  this, 
growth  comes  from  resistance,  strength  comes 
from  wrestling. 

Yet  a  certain  number  of  young  men  so  exposed 
become  moral  wrecks ;  temptation  masters 
them.  They  shame  the  name  they  bear,  and 
bring  down  gray  heads  to  the  grave  in  sorrow. 

Are  you,  earthly  father,  frighted  from  your 
purpose  on  that  account  ?  It  may  be  your  near- 
est neighbor  or  your  nearest  friend's  experience 
with  his  son.  Does  it  change  your  purpose  ? 
Nay!  to-morrow  with  prayers  and  good  words 
and  a  yearning  heart  you  will  send  the  pride  of 
your  life  forth  to  face  the  world's  temptations 
and  the  risk  of  moral  ruin,  unsheltered  save  by 
your  own  and  his  mother's  prayers,  and  the  grace 
of  his  father's  God. 

There  is  need  of  stalwart  moral  manliness  upon 
earth.  As  the  world  is,  there  is  but  one  way  to 
be  assured  of  its  existence,  we  may  even  say  only 
one  way  to  have  it  grow. 

So  universal  is  the  conviction,  that  we  act  upon 
it  in  the  whole  business  of  our  lives. 

You  decline  to  trust  merely  untried  innocence. 
You  are  not  sure  that  it  will  stand  the  test.  It 
may  be  very  fresh  and  sweat  and  fair,  but  you  do 


TEMPTED.  in 

not,  with  confidence,  depend  upon  it.  A  man  is 
honest,  you  say.  Yes,  but  has  he  ever  been 
tempted  to  dishonesty  ?  He  has  never  fallen, 
because  he  never  had  the  opportunity  to  fall. 
There  have  been  no  stumbling-blocks  in  his  road, 
therefore  he  has  never  stumbled. 

You  do  not  trust  such  an  one  with  your  busi- 
ness or  your  strong-box.  You  are  too  good  a 
judge  of  human  nature  to  put  your  interests  of 
that  sort  into  the  hands  of  one  who  has  never 
betrayed  a  trust,  because  he  never  had  a  trust  to 
betray.  You  want  a  man  who  has  shown  himself 
trustworthy,  honest,  and  true,  where  there  was 
temptation  to  be  otherwise.  And  the  larger 
the  temptation,  the  more  frequently  assailing, 
the  higher  grows  your  own  confidence  in  the  man 
who  comes  out  victorious.  You  lean  on  him  at 
last  as  on  a  rock.     Temptation  reveals  character. 

And  you  are  right  in  your  judgment,  more 
profoundly  right  than  perhaps  you  know. 

For  temptation  not  only  sifts  and  winnows,  not 
only  tests  and  reveals,  it  also  educates,  develops, 
and  strengthens.  The  moral  nature  grows  strong 
by  mastery.  The  spiritual  muscles  develop  in 
the  wrestle  with  evil.  "  My  brethren,  count  it  all 
joy  when  ye  fall  into  divers  temptations,"  saith 
the  Apostle.     He  is  looking  at  this  side  of  the 


112  TEMPTED. 

experience.  "  The  trial  of  your  faith  worketh 
patience."  The  temptation  is  anotlier  call  to 
spiritual  wrestling  and  spiritual  growth,  the  op- 
portunity for  another  increase  of  steadfastness, 
endurance,  and  trust.  The  soul  comes  out  strained 
and  scarred,  perhaps,  for  the  wrestle  was  for  life 
and  death.  But  it  comes  out  victorious,  and  has 
gained  earnest  of  victories  to  come.  Tempta- 
tion mastered,  creates  character 

And  still,  after  all.  the  strange  mystery  remains 
that  the  Father,  whom  we  believe  loving  and 
pitiful,  knowing  so  many  of  them  will  fail  and 
go  to  ruin,  does  yet  lead  His  children  into  this 
wilderness  of  life  and  expose  them  to  tempta- 
tion, 

I  am  not  trying  to  explain  the  mystery.  It  is 
not  explainable.  I  certainly  am  not  trying  to 
explain  it  away.  All  ultimates  are  mysteries, 
and  this  is  an  ultimate. 

I  am  only  pointing  out  that  the  law  of  survival 
holds  in  things  spiritual,  as  in  things  natural,  that 
the  condition  is  perfectly  natural  and  precisely 
what  one  might  have  expected  had  he  been  before- 
hand told  that  spiritual  beings  were  to  be  in  this 
world  at  all. 

It  is  by  its  own  open  confession  a  very  imper- 
fect world.     It  is  ragged,  incomplete,  crude,  and 


TEMPTED.  113 

savage.  It  has  to  be  fought  with  and  mastered 
or  it  casts  out  its  failures  relentlessly. 

The  Sons  of  God  placed  in  it,  apart  from  the 
question  of  the  purpose  in  their  placing,  are  put, 
as  a  matter  of  course,  under  the  Law  by  which 
this  imperfect  world  is  guided. 

They  too  must  be  sifted  and  tried.  They  too 
must  be  trained  by  struggle  and  developed  by 
resistance.  They  too  must  accept  the  risks  of 
failure  and  destruction.  As  individuals  and  as 
nations  and  races  they  fail  and  are  swept  away 
before  our  eyes. 

What  I  mean  to  say  is  that  it  is  all  in  the  law 
and  the  order,  all  entirely  natural  and  to  be  ex- 
pected in  a  world  like  this. 

Practical  wisdom  accepts  the  situation,  bends 
to  the  law,  orders  itself  according  to  the  facts, 
and  leaves  insoluble  mysteries  unsolved  here  as 
everywhere,  as  in  any  case  it  must  do. 

But  you  say,  "  all  this  was  known  before. 
Wherein  are  we  the  better  for  the  revelation  ? 
The  fact  still  remains,  and  men  go  to  wreck  yet 
by  millions  before  our  eyes.  Where  is  any  fact 
or  any  knowledge  revealed  to  us  further  which 
traverses  this  abiding  and  ugly  fact,  that  after  all 
only  the  strong  survive  and  the  weak  still  perish 
miserably  ?     You  have  shown  us  that  the  pitiless 


114  TEMPTED. 

law  reigns  in  the  spiritual  as  in  the  material. 
Where  is  the  comfort  in  that  ?  " 

I  point  again  to  the  Man  in  the  wilderness  and 
the  position  he  occupied.  I  find  in  that  position 
the  law  displaced,  as  far  as  our  spiritual  nature  is 
concerned,  by  a  higher  law,  which  is  yet  the  same 
expressed  in  terms  of  the  supernatural. 

The  Man  in  the  wilderness,  the  Man  tempted, 
is  the  Son  of  God.  He  is  taken  out  of  the  cate- 
gory of  earthly  things  while  yet  upon  the  earth 
and  His  feet  placed  upon  an  eternal  foundation. 

The  mind,  illuminated  by  that  revelation  of 
human  position,  declares  that  temptation  may  be 
overcome  and  turned  to  uses  only  and  to  goods. 
It  sees  with  pity,  but  with  righteous  indignation 
also,  that  men  tempt  men  and  drag  their  brethren 
down,  that  the  foul  "  residuum "  in  our  cities' 
slums,  the  dark  contingent  in  our  jails  and  peni- 
tentiaries, the  lost  souls  and  bodies  of  our  civili- 
zation and  even  Christianity,  so  called,  the  fair 
faces  "  lost  in  the  dark  depths  of  our  great 
towns,"  the  manhood  drowned  in  drunkenness, 
the  victims  of  our  sordid  greed  who  live  and  die 
in  wretchedness  like  beasts,  are  the  outcome,  not 
of  God's  ordering  nor  even  of  Nature's,  not  the 
failures  before  the  world's  temptations  or  the 
Devil's,  but  the  ruins  wrought  by  human  sin,  and 


TEMPTED. 


"5 


the  wrecks  that  men  make  of  their  weaker  breth- 
ren for  their  own  lusts  or  their  own  gain.  And 
while  it  says  and  admits  the  mystery  that  God 
has  led  up  His  children  into  the  wilderness  to  be 
tempted  of  the  Devil,  it  denies  with  all  its  voices 
that  He  has  led  them  up  to  be  tempted  of  Men  ! 

And  here  is  the  first  hope.  The  strong  con- 
viction that  they  are  God's  children.  He  may 
expose  them,  perhaps  must  expose  them,  to 
temptation,  but  He  surely  wants  them  and  in- 
tends them  to  overcome!  The  loathsome  dregs 
of  your  civilization,  in  crime  and  shame,  in  ig- 
norance and  vice,  in  drunkenness,  in  debauchery, 
are  not  of  God's  making,  but  your  own.  These 
exist  not  by  law,  but  against  law.  By  taking  the 
census  of  them,  by  tabulating  them,  by  trying  to 
account  for  them,  no  man  makes  them  lawful 
under  Nature  or  under  God.  They  are  not  facts 
on  which  to  generalize  a  law.  They  are  the  out- 
come of  man's  falsehood  and  wrong. 

Stand  upon  the  ground  of  sonship.  We  are 
all  in  the  stress  together,  all  in  the  fight  with  the 
Devil,  all  wrestling  for  life  and  breathing-room 
in  the  wilderness,  and  all  these,  the  lovv^est  fallen, 
are  children  of  God.  Beat  temptation  back  from 
them  if  you  can.  Defend  them  with  all  your 
might.     Help  them  when  they  are  hard  pressed. 


Ii6  TEMPTED. 

Throw  your  shield  over  the  weak.  Raise  up  the 
fallen.  Stand  hy  your  own  and  God's,  these  men 
and  women  round  you.  Work  for  them  as  the 
Elder  Brother  did.  Fight  for  them  as  He  fought. 
Die  for  them,  if  need  be,  as  He  died. 

The  assurance  of  all  victory  lies  in  this,  that 
the  wilderness  after  all  is  our  Father's,  that  we 
are  here  by  His  Leadership,  and  that  we  are  His 
children.  As  the  Eternal  Son  conquered,  so 
may  we  conquer  by  standing  upon  His  ground. 
The  law  for  us  as  Sons  of  God  is  not  failure,  but 
success;  not  defeat,  but  victory. 

We  have  failed  so  far,  and  the  wrecks  are  round 
us  because  we  have  insisted  that  men  are  children 
of  the  Devil,  and  that  it  is  nature  to  lead  their 
lives  by  the  Devil's  laws. 

The  Man  in  the  wilderness  has  cried  to  us  from 
afar  and  we  have  misunderstood  His  voice  or  re- 
fused to  hear  it.  But  this  Voice,  all  these  cen- 
turies, has  proclaimed  the  watchword  of  our  vic- 
tory. 

We  are  Sons,  and  the  Sons  are  not  under  Law, 
but  under  grace.  Even  in  temptation  the  Father 
wants  his  children's  deliverance,  and  seeks  their 
growth.  And  what  shall  the  children  want  ? 
Only  their  own  ?  Or  that  of  all  their  brethren  ? 
Shall  we  rise  to  the  larger  conception,  the  very 


IRMPTED.  H7 

central  idea  of  the  wilderness,  that  the  Church  is 
not  merely  to  seek  the  salvation  of  individual 
souls,  but  is  an  organized  army  of  the  Sons  of 
God  to  shelter  and  defend  mankind  from  tempta- 
tion, and  throw  the  serried  ranks  of  the  strong 
soldiers  of  the  Lord  round  every  child  of  His, 
here  sore  beset  and  beaten  ? 

And  to  the  conception  behind  and  within  that, 
that  the  world's  temptations  are  hard  enough, 
and  the  Devil's  fierce  enough  alone,  and  those 
which  are  harder  and  fiercer  and  more  accursed 
than  either,  the  temptations  and  the  traps  that 
men  set  for  men,  are,  in  the  name  and  power  of 
God,  to  be  swept  from  the  face  of  the  earth, 
should  that  involve  also  the  sweeping  away,  with 
wrath  and  indignation  of  God  and  men,  those  who 
set  them  ? 

A  world  where  men  stand  with  the  deep  con- 
viction in  their  souls  that  they  are  Sons  of  God 
will  be  a  world  where  temptation  will  remain  no 
doubt,  but  where  it  will  be  transformed  into  the 
blessing  of  a  loving  training  and  a  Fatherly  dis- 
cipline, a  world  where  not  only  God,  but  every 
child's  bigger  brother,  will  help  him  to  see  the 
use  of  temptation,  and  win  through  safely. 


LECTURE  IV. 
BREAD. 


' '  Command  that  these  stones  be  made  bi-ead. " 

Matthew  iv.  3. 


LECTURE   IV. 
BREAD. 

OF  all  animals  upon  earth  the  human  animal 
alone  is  hungry.  The  others  find  all  things 
ready  to  their  needs.  He  alone  finds  no  provi- 
sion. The  resources  are  all  in  nature,  that  is  true, 
but  he  must  master  and  utilize  the  resources. 
He  must  house,  clothe,  feed  himself  by  outrages 
upon  nature.  He  finds  no  table  spread  for  hint 
in  the  wilderness.  The  lowest  creeping  thing 
upon  the  sands,  the  most  ephemeral  insect  hum- 
ming in  the  sunshine  is  more  favored  far  than 
he.  He  alone  must  make  his  bread  out  of  the 
stones. 

But  yet  he  must  make  it.  He  must  live  while 
he  is  in  the  wilderness  and  live  under  the  low 
conditions  of  the  wilderness.  The  Son  of  God  so 
far  is  on  a  level  with  the  beasts  and  the  birds. 
Food  is  as  necessary  to  him  as  to  them. 

As  an  animal,  too,  his  organization  is  the  most 
perfect — the  most  differentiated,  the  most  hetero- 


122  BREAD. 

genized,  as  the  jargon  is,  and  his  physical  needs 
are  consequently  infinitely  greater. 

It  is  the  literal  fact  that  man,  in  his  highest 
development  as  civilized  man,  is  starved  in  the 
wilderness,  while  the  lowest  brute  is  housed  and 
fed.  The  wilderness  is  in  conspiracy  against  him 
on  his  physical  side. 

To  make  bread,  then,  not  to  find  it,  is  the 
problem  before  this  animal,  Man.  In  the  earliest 
record  of  him  that  law  is  laid  upon  him.  Other 
creatures  may  find  their  bread.  Man,  in  the 
sweat  of  his  brow,  shall  eat  his  only  when  he  has 
made  it. 

Now,  in  this  first  need  of  his  he  is  tried.  He 
must,  even  in  the  first  provision  for  his  animal 
wants,  in  the  satisfying  of  his  merely  animal  hun- 
ger, in  his  very  eating  to  live  on  earth,  he  must 
stand  apart  from  all  creatures  else,  and  find  this 
a  moral  discipline.  A  stranger  in  the  wilderness, 
the  Son  of  God,  he  carries  his  nature  with  him, 
and  the  conditions  of  the  wilderness  are  con- 
verted into  spiritual  conditions.  The  struggle 
for  existence  becomes,  in  his  case,  a  moral  strug- 
gle.    How,  rightly,  shall  he  get  bread  ? 

The  hungry  beast  gets  his  food  where  he  can, 
and  how  he  can.  He  is  controlled  by  no  power 
but  his  hunger.     He  recognizes  no  right  but  the 


BREAD.  123 

imperious  right  of  animal  want.  There  are  no 
rights  in  others  as  against  that.  His  food  is 
before  him.  He  takes  it,  cannot  help  taking  it. 
It  is  all  purely  animal.  He  feeds  under  a  physi' 
cal  compulsion. 

The  man  who  makes  his  bread  to  supply  his 
own  hunger  and  that  of  even  the  beasts  which 
depend  upon  him,  is  at  once,  as  in  all  his  activities, 
put  under  the  ethical  laws  which  are  supreme 
over  all  his  actions,  little  or  great,  and  finds  him- 
self under  spiritual  discipline,  spiritual  trial  and 
tempting  even  in  the  matter  of  his  bodily  food. 

Therefore  it  is  in  the  natural  order  that  the 
Son  of  God  is  assailed  and  tested  first  through 
his  physical  want. 

In  the  case  of  the  Lord  here,  what  was  the 
point  of  the  temptation  ?  There  is  the  divine 
side  in  every  activity,  there  is  also  the  diabolic 
side.  What  was  the  diabolic  side  ?  According 
to  our  argument  He  was  standing  for  us  all. 
We  are  trying  to  understand  from  his  experi- 
ence in  the  wilderness  our  own  position,  our  own 
temptations  and  their  meaning,  our  own  security 
in  and  deliverance  froj)i  the  temptations.  He 
stands  for  humanity  especially  and  peculiarly  in 
this  transaction. 

What  was  the  exact  pomt,  then,  in  the  assault 


124 


BREAD. 


that  tried  Him  ?  TJuit  determined,  we  find  the 
exact  point  also  of  the  assault  upon  humanity 
for  all  time  through  its  animal  needs,  and  also 
how  the  supply  of  those  animal  needs  is  an  ethi. 
cal  training,  because  it  may  become  the  line  of 
an  ethical  assault.  For  we  have  seen  that  tempta- 
tion can  only  come  in  the  line  of  moral  discipline. 

"  Command  that  these  stones  be  made  bread." 
Is  it,  then,  a  sin  to  make  bread  out  of  stones  ?  Is 
that  the  point  ?  Does  the  wrong  lie  in  the  ma- 
terial out  of  which  we  make  the  bread  ? 

We  pass  that,  ot  course.  Such  questions  an- 
swer themselves.  We  must  leave  out  the  case 
(for  there  was  no  question  of  that  here)  of  the 
unhappy  bakers  of  our  time  who  follow  the 
Devil's  order  literally,  and,  to  the  ruin  of  their 
own  poor  sinful  souls  and  the  stomachs  of  their 
customers,  do  actually  mix  ahivi  with  their  flour. 
As  also  we  leave  out  of  the  case  their  no  less  sinful 
brethren,  the  wretched  creatures  who  induce  the 
ignorant  to  mix  the  poison  of  their  patent  baking 
powders  in  the  morning  rolls  of  innocent  people 
who  have  never  harmed  them  !  Even  the  Devil, 
we  are  safe  in  saying,  had  no  notion,  as  yet,  of 
the  possible  diabolism  of  men  when  put  in  pos- 
session of  the  science  of  the  nineteenth  century! 

The  wrong  could  not  lie  in  the  making  bread 


BREAD.  125 

out  of  stones,  for  that  is  exactly  what  men 
have  been  doing  since  the  world  began,  what 
they  are,  by  the  needs  of  their  situation,  com- 
pelled to  do,  what  the  Father  commanded  them 
to  do  when  He  led  them  first  into  the  wilderness. 

Bread  from  stones!  The  measure  of  its  mak- 
ing is  the  measure  of  human  advancement.  The 
progress  of  men  depends  upon  the  extent  to 
which,  more  and  more,  man  learns  how  to  turn 
the  useless  stones  of  the  earth  into  supplies  for 
his  needs! 

We  are  doing  this  triumphantly  in  our  day, 
and  we  rightly  congratulate  ourselves  upon  our 
success.  We  drag  the  shapeless  ore  from  the 
bases  of  the  hills,  the  coal  from  the  deep  caverns 
where  it  hides ;  we  convert  them  into  power 
under  our  hands.  The  great  engines  throb  with 
the  pulses  of  imprisoned  might.  The  red  furnace 
fires  light  the  darkness  of  our  midnights,  the 
melting  torrents  of  the  iron  rush  blinding  bright 
to  the  moulds  which  shape  them  to  our  use,  the 
strong-armed  toilers  man  the  forges,  and  the 
hammers  clank  and  clang  as  they  beat  the  iron 
into  bread! 

We  are  finding  nothing  without  its  use.  The 
waste  of  our  factories  is  fast  ceasing  to  be  waste. 
The  refuse  in  shapeless  slag  of  our  foundries  and 


126  BREAD. 

metal  works  is  turned  to  new  values.  We  are 
believing  that  nothing  is  made  in  vain.  The 
desert  turns  to  riches  under  the  hand  of  industry 
and  knowledge.  The  wilderness,  the  barren  sea, 
the  splintered  rocks  become  abundant  in  bread. 
The  nettle  fibre  is  converted  into  webs  of  beauty. 
The  useless  sea-wrack  tossed  by  the  wave  upon 
the  brown  sand  of  the  shore  is  "  useless "  and 
"  vile  "  no  longer. 

Thousands  upon  thousands  of  men  are  making 
their  bread  out  of  the  sand  and  the  stones.  The 
wealth  of  the  world  in  large  part  to-day  exists 
from  thing  useless  half  a  century  ago,  and  men 
gather  about  bountiful  tables  and  thank  God,  let 
us  hope,  for  bread  created  out  of  material  hard 
and  intractable,  worthless  apparently  and  forbid- 
ding as  the  ragged  splinters  of  the  Syrian  rocks. 

And  our  advance  depends,  as  we  see,  upon  this 
instinct  and  this  endeavor.  That  we  can  make 
bread  out  of  stones  is  the  prerogative  of  the 
Sons  of  God.  It  is  a  unique  prerogative,  and  in 
its  creative  power  allies  man  to  his  Father.  That 
he  must  make  bread  from  stones  is  the  inexorable 
necessity  of  the  wilderness. 

This  prerogative  and  this  necessity  have  driven 
us  forward.  We  are  impelled  by  the  unconquer- 
able desire  of  testing  our  sovereignty  in  the  wil- 


BREAD.  127 

derness  to  find  more  and  more  materials  of  which 
to  make  our  bread,  and  other  regions  in  which 
such  materials  exist. 

Hence  all  our  commerce,  all  our  explorations, 
all  our  settling  and  our  civilizing,  all  our  new 
States  and  new  cities,  all  our  inventions,  our  prac- 
tical science,  our  politics,  our  news  gathering  and 
distribution,  our  treaties,  our  international  con- 
nections. 

Hungry  man  roams  the  wilderness,  the  coarse, 
shaggy,  uncivilized,  and  ungainly  earth,  to  find 
stones  to  make  his  bread.  He  is  very  hungry. 
And  he  is  somewhat  capricious.  He  wants  new 
flavors  in  his  loaves,  new  dishes  on  his  table,  new 
relishes  to  his  bread.  He  roams  the  world  for 
them.  And  he  wants  to  be  sure  of  his  supply. 
So  he  organizes  his  roamings  into  explorations, 
into  merchant  business  and  commerce,  and  the 
mapping  of  the  trackless  seas. 

He  endures  want,  hunger  and  thirst,  and  loneli- 
ness. He  wears  himself  in  muscle  and  in  brain. 
He  denies  himself  up  to  the  last  necessities  and 
beyond.  He  works  with  every  power  of  hand 
and  mind.  He  is  reducing,  exploring,  mapping, 
and  mastering  the  world  in  his  hunger  for  bread 
which  neither  Nature  nor  God  will  make  for  Jam 
as   they   do   for   the   sparrow   on   the   house-top, 


128  BREAD. 

which,  being  the  Son  of  God,  he  must  make  for 
himself,  the  furnished  raw  material  being  stones! 

Does  one  want  it  literally  ?  Let  him  take  a 
wheat-sheaf  in  the  harvest  field,  the  result  of  the 
husbandman's  toil  from  the  months  past  of 
plowing,  sowing,  and  of  reaping,  and  he  finds  his 
bread,  in  this  rudest  and  earliest  form  of  making 
bread,  growing  out  of,  upheld  by,  and  prepared 
for  him  by  the  flint  itself  in  stalk,  leaf,  and  seed 
covering! 

The  point  of  the  temptation,  then,  was  not 
the  making  of  bread  from  stones.  There  is 
nothing  wrong  there. 

Did  it  lie  in  making  too  much  bread,  more 
bread  than  was  needed  ?  For  while  St.  Luke 
writes,  "  Speak  to  this  stone  that  it  may  become 
a  loaf,"  St.  Matthew  writes,  "  Speak  to  these 
stones  that  they  may  becomes  loaves." 

Manifestly  the  question  amounts  to  this:  Is  it  a 
sin  to  have  abundance  of  bread  ?  Is  it  morally 
wrong  to  be  rich  ?  And  is  this  the  suggestion  to 
evil  here  ? 

We  answer  that  abundance  of  bread  is  a  bless- 
ing promised  by  the  Lord  to  His  own.  It  is  a 
mark  of  Divine  favor.  The  notion  that  there  is 
something  holy  in  poverty  and  want,  something 
pleasing  to  God  in  starvation  and  misery,  is  about 


BREAD. 


129 


as  unchristian  as  it  is  irrational.  That  such  an 
idea  exists,  that  one  can  even  find  it  in  devotional 
books,  and  hear  the  echo  of  it  from  pulpits  now 
and  then,  is  but  evidence  of  the  persistence  of 
the  worst  suggestions  of  old  Paganism,  or  at  least 
old  Manicheism,  under  Christian  forms. 

Riches  and  plenty  are  the  gifts  of  God  to  hu- 
man industry,  patience,  and  self-control.  The 
more  riches  the  better,  so  the  man  remain  master 
of  his  riches.  The  more  bread  the  better,  so  the 
man  remain  master  of  his  bread. 

Abraham  was  one  of  the  richest  men  of  his 
day,  a  prince  and  leader  in  the  East,  and  he  was 
"the  Friend  of  God."  Melchizedek  was  a  king 
as  well  as  "  a  Priest  of  the  Most  High  God."  Job 
was  the  greatest  sheik  and  the  richest  in  all  the 
eastern  land,  and  God  blessed  him  after  his  trial 
by  giving  him  twice  as  much  as  he  had  before. 

Is  a  tramp  the  favorite  of  Heaven,  and  is  the 
millionaire  a  sinner  in  its  sight  ?  Is  the  pauper 
living  a  godly  life,  and  are  you,  who  are  taxed 
to  support  him,  living  evil  lives  ?  Was  the  Prodi- 
gal Son  among  the  swine,  who  would  fain  have 
eaten  the  carob-pods  the  swine  were  fed  on,  alto- 
gether righteous,  and  his  Father  altogether  a 
sinner  because  he  had  "  bread  enough  and  to 
spare  ?  "  To  ask  the  questions  is  to  answer  them. 
9 


I30 


BREAD. 


Turn  to  races  and  peoples.  Were  the  North 
American  Indians,  living  from  hand  to  mouth 
and  not  sure  of  to-morrow's  dinner,  a  holy  peo- 
ple, and  the  civilized  Europeans  unholy  because 
they  had  dinners,  under  necessity,  for  half  the 
world  as  well  as  for  themselves  ? 

Are  the  United  States  and  Great  Britain  the 
wickedest  peoples  upon  the  earth  because  they 
are  the  richest  ?  Does  the  just  Judge  of  all  the 
world  show  His  indignation  against  us  for  our 
transgressions,  by  giving  us  "  a  land  whose  stones 
are  iron,  and  out  of  whose  hills  we  may  dig 
brass,"  a  land  filled  with  the  stored  sunlight  of 
the  ages  past  in  coal  mine  and  oil  fountain,  with 
the  ore  from  the  great  fires  that  roared  when  the 
mountain  hammers  shook  the  rocking  world, 
before  recorded  time  ?  A  land  where  the  yellow 
corn  laughs  on  every  hillside  and  valley  in  the 
harvest  ?  Where  the  great  rivers  run  through  a 
thousand  leagues  of  exhaustless  fertility  ?  Where 
the  blue  lakes  ripple  to  the  margin  of  the  teeming 
prairie  and  the  wealthy  woodland  ?  Are  all  these 
God's  visitations  upon  us  for  our  sins,  because 
we  are  making  our  bread  so  abundantly  that  the 
white-winged  ships  or  the  fire-driven  coursers  of 
the  Deep  are  bearing  it  to  every  haven  where 
men  are  an  hungered  ? 


BREAD. 


131 


And  our  great  kinsmen  across  the  waves,  are 
they  the  worst  of  European  peoples  because  God 
has  given  them  lordship  over  the  teeming  plains 
of  India,  over  the  exhaustless  resources  of  the 
Island  Continent  of  the  South,  over  all  the  seas 
and  over  shores  illimitable,  and  made  their  mer- 
chants princes  and  their  bankers  among  the  rulers 
of  the  earth  ? 

We  are  fond  of  thinking  just  the  other  way. 
We  say  the  two  peoples  most  rich  and  abundant 
in  bread  are  so  by  the  blessing  of  the  Lord,  are 
so  by  good  purpose  of  the  Lord,  and  for  good 
ends  in  His  ordering  of  the  world.  We  say, 
indeed,  that  under  the  abiding  law — "  Whatso- 
ever a  man  soweth  that  shall  he  also  reap  " — 
these  peoples  have  gotten  what  they  worked  for. 
They  have  earned  what  they  possess.  Courage, 
patience,  perseverance,  industry,  self-restraint, 
fixed  ideals  of  liberty,  law,  obedience — these  have 
gone  into  their  making,  and  riches  and  power  in 
plenty  and  to  spare  have  been  their  honest  re- 
ward. 

For  here  there  comes  to  us  this  other  consid- 
eration. In  the  making  of  his  bread  in  the 
world,  in  dealing  with  his  lowest  animal  needs, 
there  comes  to  him  ethical  discipline.  To  make 
bread  out   of   stones  rightly,  there   is  necessary 


132  BREAD. 

for  man  the  human  qualities.  He  must  make 
his  ozvn  bread.  It  requires  industry.  It  demands 
patience,  temperance,  self-restraint.  Courage  is 
needed  and  faith,  faith  in  God,  in  law,  in  order, 
in  himself,  and  in  his  neighbors. 

Mutual  help  and  mutual  trust  are  demanded 
by  the  conditions.  We  cannot  produce  a  single 
harvest  without  industry,  without  trust  in  the 
Lord  of  the  Harvest.  Whatsoever  and  whosoever 
we  consider  him  to  be — Our  Father  in  Heaven 
from  Whom  you  and  I  ask  our  daily  bread,  or 
"  the  Power  behind  Phenomena"  whom  we  know 
only  by  his  inarticulate  heavings  and  writhings 
as  of  Enceladus  under  ^Etna — we  must  still  trust 
him,  still,  you  see,  put  ourselves  in  the  hands  of 
some  Power  invisible — our  only  question  being 
whether  it  is  a  Power  that  has  or  has  not  sense, 
a  Power  one  can  go  to  and  ask  for  things,  or  a 
dumb,  stupid  Force  that  cannot  hear  you  and 
has  no  sense  to  understand  you  if  it  did!  that 
cannot  lift  from  above  its  "  lubber  length  "  the 
material  mass  that  crushes  and  conceals  it,  long 
enough  to  utter  one  articulate  word,  or  show  us 
one  finger  of  its  hand! 

Faith  is,  however,  demanded  as  you  and  other 
men  are  trained  in  it,  some  trust  and  some  de- 
pendence upon  powers  invisible,  and  to  us  at  least 


BREAD. 


^Z2» 


omnipotent,  and  that  in  itself  is  moral  training, 
even  a  spiritual.  We  get  that  much  even  in 
getting  our  bread. 

Indeed,  this  whole  business  of  bread-making 
by  men  is  removed  whole  hemispheres,  as  we 
see,  from  the  foraging  and  preying  of  the  beast. 
It  is  no  answer  to  this  to  say  that  savages  seek 
their  good  and  get  it  very  much  like  the  brutes, 
on  very  low  levels  indeed  of  human  effort.  Even 
in  their  case,  when  we  look  closely,  the  difference 
is  enormous.  But  we  are  speaking  of  men  who 
are  most  differentiated  from  the  animals,  are 
most  human,  and  therefore  most  consciously  the 
Sons  of  God,  and  tJicir  bread-making  and  bread- 
consuming  becomes  such  that  the  Lord  can  make 
a  sacrament  of  the  material  and  turn  the  meals 
of  men  into  symbols  of  divine  mysteries. 

Bread  and  Wine  become  the  outward  signs  of 
spiritual  realities.  Bread  and  Wine,  observe,  not 
Fruit  and  Water.  These  last  are  the  food  and 
drink  of  the  foragers,  the  mere  animals  of  the 
world.  But  Bread  and  Wine,  the  results  of  the 
creative  intelligence  and  power  of  the  Sons  of 
God  working  on  the  dumb  material,  symbols  of 
all  the  victories  of  order  over  disorder,  of  the 
spiritual  over  the  material  on  earth.  The  Supper 
of  the  Lord  must  be  a  purely  Jiiunan  meal. 


134  BREAD. 

The  temptation,  then,  we  conclude  was  not  in 
the  making  of  bread.  It  was  not  in  the  making 
it  out  of  stones.  It  was  not  in  the  making  it 
abundantly.     We  must  go  further. 

Who  asked  the  Son  in  the  wilderness  to  make 
the  bread  ?  Is  not  that  the  question  which  lets 
light  into  the  heart  of  the  situation  ? 

The  temptation  was  to  make  bread  at  the  bid- 
ding of  the  Devil.  To  make  it  at  God's  bidding, 
under  God's  order,  is  a  necessity  and  a  duty.  To 
make  plenty  of  it,  enormous  quantities  of  it,  is 
right.  To  turn  all  the  stones  of  the  desert  into 
bread  may  be  a  thing  desirable,  and  certainly  is 
no  sin. 

But  to  do  it  at  the  suggestion  of  the  Devil,  in 
his  time  and  Jiis  way,  and  as  under  his  obedience, 
there  lies  the  fatal  failure  and  apostasy  for  a  Son 
of  God.  The  Man  in  the  wilderness,  who  de- 
clined to  make  bread  for  His  own  sore  hunger 
because  the  Tempter  bade  Him,  does  not  hesitate, 
in  another  desert  place,  to  feed  five  thousand  with 
five  loaves  when  they  are  hungry.  And  this 
temptation,  as  we  see  at  once,  is  an  abiding 
temptation  of  the  situation.  It  is  continually  at 
home  in  the  wilderness.  It  continually  assails 
men.  And  it  assails  them  because  they  are  Sons 
of  God,  and  on  the  ground  of  that  sonship  and 


BREAD.  135 

the  power  that  sonship  gives.  Since  the  getting 
of  his  bread  is  a  moral  training  to  a  man  in  the 
world,  so  it  may  be  perverted  to  his  moral  curse 
and  ruin. 

The  first  gate  through  which  he  is  to  be  assailed 
is,  from  the  condition  of  things,  the  gate  of  his 
animal  necessities.  Through  these  high  and  low 
together  may  be  assailed.  It  is  the  common 
highway,  for  at  this  point  the  material  and  the 
spiritual  first  touch.  Through  this  gate  the  soul 
first  enters  into  the  wilderness,  becomes  cogni- 
zant of  the  existence  of  the  v/ilderncss,  and  finds 
itself  alone  and  a  stranger  there.  Through  this 
gate  the  soul  of  the  sage  and  the  soul  of  the 
clown  alike  look  out  into  the  wilderness  and  ask 
for  bread. 

The  first  trial  comes  here,  the  first  training. 
Here  therefore  also  comes  the  first  attempt  to 
sift,  and  if  it  may  be,  to  overthrow  and  ruin  the 
Son  of  God. 

Being  the  Son  of  God,  and  having  a  son's  rights 
and  royalties  in  his  Father's  house,  the  Tempter 
meets  him  on  that  ground.  "You  can  do  what 
you  will  since  you  are  the  Son  of  God.  All  things 
here  are  your  own.  There  is  no  need  for  hunger. 
The  Father  has  not  provided  for  you  just  now. 
He  seems  to   have   forgotten   you   for  the  time 


136  BREAD. 

being.  His  arrangements  appear  not  to  have 
taken  account  of  this  emergency  or  worked  up 
to  it.  You  are  thrown  upon  your  own  resources 
'  Command  that  these  stones  be  made  bread ! '  " 

Bread  at  the  suggestion  of  the  Devil!  Bread 
in  the  Devil's  fashion !  Distrust  of  the  Father 
and  the  Father's  laws.  Distrust  therefore  of  our 
own  Sonship!  The  abandonment  of  our  Son- 
ship,  the  denial  of  it!  The  submission  to  the 
Devil!  The  acknowledgment  of  his  wisdom  and 
power,  even  his  kindness  and  care  for  men  in 
need !  The  confession  that  the  world  is  his,  and 
he  has  the  right  to  give  orders  upon  it,  and  dis- 
pose of  even  so  much  as  the  stones  of  its  deserts! 
This  is  all  involved  in  the  temptation  ! 

Need  I  point  out  to  you  how  men  have  yielded  ? 
How  the  millions  fail  just  here  at  the  threshold  ? 
How  making  bread  at  the  Devil's  bidding  has 
filled  our  jails,  peopled  our  almshouses,  stocked 
our  asylums,  created  the  misery  and  degradation 
of  our  great  cities,  and  ground  down  the  millions 
of  the  world's  toilers  in  poverty,  into  lives  scarce 
human  ? 

The  boy  wants  to  make  bread  in  the  Devil's 
way.  He  pilfers  from  his  employer's  till  in  the 
small  way  allowed  him.  The  trusted  clerk  or 
manager  wants    to    make    bread    in    the   .Devil's 


BREAD.  137 

fashion.  He  forges,  or  empties  the  safe.  The 
burglar  looks  for  his  bread  in  the  same  way,  and 
breaks  into  your  house,  and  if  need  be  murders 
you  to  get  away  with  his  material. 

The  dishonest  merchant  breaks  and  makes  a 
fraudulent  assignment,  ruining  scores  of  innocent 
and  honest  people,  because  he  believes  the  Devil 
will  provide  him  with  more  abundant  and  better 
bread  than  God  and  his  own  right  effort. 

Let  us  confess  the  temptation  is  not  only  the 
common  one,  but  the  strong.  At  times  it  seems 
as  if  there  were  no  reply  possible.  In  the  cor- 
rupted currents  of  this  world  honesty  at  times 
seems  the  worst  policy.  A  man  stands  bewil- 
dered before  successful  fraud.  The  knave  wins 
his  way  and  prospers.  The  cheat  is  successful. 
The  man  of  integrity  struggles  in  poverty,  and 
lays  down  his  toil  at  last,  with  hands  folded  to 
their  last  rest,  weary  and  worn  hands,  aching 
head  and  bewildered  heart,  glad  that  the  end  has 
come.  He  dies  in  obscurity  as  he  had  lived. 
His  life  has  been,  by  the  world's  measures,  a  fail- 
ure. He  lies  under  the  clover,  and  no  man  asks 
for  his  grave  or  proposes  a  monument  to  keep 
his  memory  in  honor. 

A  man  beside  him  has  lived  a  knavish  life,  and 
all    men    have    known    it.       He    has    prospered. 


138  BREAD. 

Riches  and  honor  have  been  his,  notwithstand- 
ing, all  the  days  of  his  life.  Men  have  given  him 
high  place  among  them,  have  recognized  him  as 
a  power  in  the  world,  have  sought  to  be  his 
friends  as  an  honor  to  themselves,  have  flattered 
him  and  imitated  him,  have  even  exhausted  their 
mother  tongue  to  express  their  admiration  of  his 
character  and  his  success. 

And  when  he  is  dead  the  forum  and  the  mar- 
ket echo  with  the  sound  of  his  fall.  Values  are 
changed.  Great  interests  are  affected.  Power- 
ful corporations  take  observations  of  their  posi- 
tion ;  ask  how  the  great  man's  death  will  influ- 
ence their  business  or  their  securities.  The  news- 
papers print  columns  about  the  distinguished 
citizen  and  hold  his  life  up  as  an  example  to  the 
young  men  of  the  country;  reams  of  resolutions 
bewailing  his  loss  to  an  admiring  community  are 
sent  to  his  af^icted  family  or  spread  out  in  the 
public  press,  that  reservoir  of  pure  truth  and 
mirror  of  lofty  integrity  which  we  all  so  believe  in 
and  admire ! 

He  is  buried  with  all  the  distinction  a  "  success- 
ful "  life  demands.  The  foremost  citizens  are  hon- 
ored by  being  asked  to  bear  his  pall.  His  body 
rests  in  satin  and  is  cased  in  rosewood  and  velvet. 
The  speaking  marble  lifts  itself  aloft  and  lies  in 


BREAD.  139 

the  face  of  the  sun  without  a  blush,  bearing  a 
record  of  such  worth  and  virtue  above  his  pom- 
pous tomb  as  the  poor  creature  himself  never 
believed  in,  for  either  heaven  or  earth. 

Contrasts  like  these  are  familiar  experiences  in 
life,  and  they  are  dreadfully  staggering  to  one's 
faith. 

In  these  latter  days,  when  the  word  Bread  has 
taken  on  a  far  larger  meaning,  when  it  is  no  more 
the  necessaries  of  life  or  even  the  comforts,  when 
our  fathers'  necessities  would  be  to  us  want,  and 
our  fathers'  comforts  our  prime  necessities,  when 
their  luxuries  indeed  have  become  to  us  essentials 
of  existence,  the  temptation  is  growing  more 
pressing  daily.  We  need  so  much  Bread  now, 
and  such  varied  kinds.  The  plain  fare  of  our 
grandfathers  will  no  longer  serve.  We  want 
books,  we  want  pictures  in  our  homes,  we  want 
to  profit,  in  our  own  persons,  by  the  conquests 
we  have  made  over  nature.  No  cottage  now, 
unless  "  a  cottage  of  gentility,"  if  not  "  with  a 
double  coach  house,"  at  least  "with  all  the  mod- 
ern improvements,"  hot  and  cold  water  in  every 
room,  steam-heaters  and  electric  bells,  "hard 
wood  finish"  inside,  and  painted  all  the  colors  of 
the  rainbow  outside,  as  a  libel  on  the  memory  of 
"  good  Queen  Anne  !  " 


I40  BREAD. 

I  do  not  condemn  this,  observe.  Believing  that 
all  the  stones  of  the  world  are  given  to  the  Sons 
of  God,  that  they  may  make  bread,  believing  that 
the  supply  of  their  bodily  needs  is  not  a  brute 
business  but  a  divine,  I  am  not  sorry  but  glad 
that,  in  ever  widening  circles,  men  are  bringing 
the  wilderness  under  contribution,  that  their 
wants  are  educated  by  their  continued  supply, 
that  they  are  still  hungry  for  richer,  better,  and 
costlier  Bread,  in  every  generation,  and  in  in- 
creasing numbers  in  each.  For  so  they  are  driven, 
more  and  more,  to  explore  the  wilderness,  to  find 
out  its  value  as  a  Bread-producing  place,  to  mas- 
ter it  and  civilize  it  and  turn  it  to  human  and 
orderly  uses. 

The  insatiable  hunger  of  the  Sons  of  God  upon 
the  earth  is  the  motive  power,  original  and  rude, 
but  very  strong,  indeed  strongest  of  all,  which 
is  conquering  the  world.  And  I  am  glad  to  know 
that  hunger  can  never  be  appeased,  that  it  grows 
with  what  it  feeds  on,  that  it  is  not  a  beast's 
hunger  which  can  be  satisfied  and  so  to  sleep, 
but  a  human  hunger  and  a  divine,  which  can 
never  be  satisfied  till  it  feeds  upon  the  Bread  of 
Heaven  in  the  great  Feast  of  the  Children's 
return ! 

But  I  also  see  that  the  increasing  wants  of  men 


BREAD.  141 

necessarily  increase  their  temptations.  I  see  that 
the  impulse  to  take  the  Devil's  word  for  truth  is 
necessarily  more  frequent  and  more  potent  where 
men's  tastes  have  been  most  highly  educated  and 
their  wants  most  increased. 

So  comes  the  list  of  robberies,  breaches  of 
trust  in  private  companies  and  in  public  offices, 
which  extends  itself  in  our  daily  papers.  Hence, 
too,  the  wild  gambling  in  the  stock  and  other  ex- 
changes which  calls  itself  legitimate,  as  well  as 
that  other  gambling  which  goes  under  its  own 
proper  name,  though  scarcely  worse. 

Combinations  to  compel  the  poor  man  to  pay 
a  penny  more  for  his  loaf  or  his  bushel  of  coal, 
while  the  other  poor  man  who  produces  the  loaf 
or  works  in  the  coal  mine  is  reduced  to  the  low- 
est possible  wage  on  which  he  can  work  at  all. 
Importation  of  the  most  degraded  classes  from 
the  slums  of  the  old  world,  diseased,  ignorant, 
vicious,  even  criminal,  to  drive  out  the  native 
workman,  whose  American  sense  of  decency,  and 
of  what  belongs  to  his  family,  will  not  allow  him 
to  be  content  with  the  conditions  in  which  these 
others  live. 

These,  too,  and  the  rich  man's  greed  and  the 
clerk's  knavery,  the  bank  president's  robbery  and 
the  sneak-thief's  larceny,  the  merchant's  failure 


142 


BREAD. 


and  the  dishonest  workman's  dishonest  work,  the 
garments  that  fall  to  pieces  and  the  shoes  that 
do  not  wear,  the  badly  built  house  and  the  adul- 
terated food,  the  wall  that  tumbles  down  and 
kills  its  builders,  the  fraud,  sham,  and  lies  of  busi- 
ness and  of  life — all  are  a  yielding  to  the  Tempta- 
tion— the  attempt  to  make  one's  bread  at  the 
Devil's  suggestion  or  command. 

A  universal  yielding  would  make  human  so- 
ciety impossible.  Any  yielding  is,  as  far  as  it 
goes,  high  treason  to  that  society.  For  society 
is  divine,  and  can  exist  only  upon  divine  laws, 
upon  the  express  and  foundation  understanding 
that  the  Devil's  bread  is  poison ! 

It  may  exist  for  a  time,  and  even  give  no  signs 
of  its  deadly  affection,  and  yet  contrive  to  get 
rid  of  a  good  deal  of  the  poison,  if  it  be  a  young 
vigorous  society  with  a  good  inherited  constitu- 
tion. 

But  only  let  the  condition  continue  and  the 
strongest  social  order  ever  framed  will  die  in 
convulsions.  It  can  only  stand  and  prosper  on 
the  clear  principle  that  the  world's  materials  for 
bread  are  God's,  and  that  men  must  handle  them, 
and  get  their  bread,  whether  nations  or  individ- 
uals, as  Sons  of  God  and  brethren  of  one  Family. 

But  how  to  face  the  Temptation  ! 


BREAD.  143 

The  voice  from  the  wilderness  is  clear.  The 
Son  there  stands  upon  His  Sonship  as  a  Man. 
He  throws  up  the  common  shield  under  which 
all  men  may  shelter — the  Word  of  God. 

"  Man  doth  not  live  by  bread  only,  but  by  every 
word  that  proceedeth  out  of  the  mouth  of  God." 

The  beasts  live  only  by  food.  Keep  that  away, 
they  die,  and  there  is  an  end.  Man  dies  and 
there  is  not  an  end.  The  life  which  makes  him 
human  does  not  depend  upon  bread.  The  temp- 
tation owes  all  its  force  to  the  idea  that  man  is 
but  an  animal,  that  if  the  animal  life  perishes,  all 
has  perished.  It  is  quite  possible  the  Devil 
thought  so,  at  all  events  had  accepted  materialism. 
He  was  preaching  it  here.     He  always  does. 

Yet  see  how  simple  a  word  explodes  the  false- 
hood! "  Man  has  two  lives.  One  of  them  is  sup- 
ported by  bread.  It  is  not  the  most  important 
life,  not  that  which  makes  man.  There  is  another 
life  which  differentiates  humanity,  is  its  specific 
character  and  distinction,  and  that  does  not  live 
by  bread." 

It  is  the  same  thing  in  the  question,  "  Is  not 
the  life  more  than  meat,  and  the  body  than  rai- 
ment ?  "  In  the  other  declaration,  "  He  that  find- 
eth  his  life  shall  lose  it,  and  he  that  loseth  his 
life,  for  my  sake,  shall  find  it." 


144 


BREAD. 


Need  we  of  all  men  be  told  of  the  sweet  rea- 
sonableness of  the  position  ?  Did  not  the  men 
we  hold  for  our  highest  types  and  examples  stand 
upon  it,  and  become  strong  and  fair  for  the  vision 
of  all  time  ? 

The  earthly  life  is  valuable!  Yes!  But  its 
value  is  not  infinite.  There  are  things  far  more 
precious  than  life.  We  have,  again  and  again, 
reckoned  its  value  and  prized  many  things  be- 
yond it.  Better  a  dead  honest  man  than  a  living 
knave!  Better  a  dead  truth-speaker  than  a  living 
liar!     Better  a  dead  hero  than  a  living  coward! 

As  a  people  believes  these  things  in  its  heart, 
so  is  its  power.  Find  the  number  of  men  in  this 
land  who  hold  truth,  integrity,  honor,  and  manli- 
ness dearer  than  life,  and  you  have  the  physical 
as  well  as  moral  force  of  the  land,  the  men  who, 
by  God's  blessing,  will  save  the  land  in  its  need ! 

For  these  have  the  root  of  the  matter  in  them. 
They  may  be,  in  many  points  of  view,  rough-look- 
ing Christians.  But  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that 
they  have  found  the  central  ground,  on  which 
alone  any  true  Christian,  and,  that  is,  any  genu- 
ine manly  life  can  be  lived  in  this  world. 

It  is  our  thanksgiving  to  God,  who  rules  among 
the  peoples,  that  in  the  crises  of  its  trial,  in  the 
darkest  days  of  its  long  pilgrimage,  our  race  has 


BREAD.  145 

never  wanted  men  who  knew  that  law,  and  home 
and  freedom  and  faith  were  worth  lives  by  the 
thousand,  and  who  have  stood  bravely  ready  to 
give  their  own,  and  count  them  saved  in  the 
giving! 

Is  there  any  virtue  in  living  a  mere  animal  life? 
If  that  be  all,  how  much,  in  the  common  con- 
science of  Americans  or  Englishmen,  is  life  worth? 
Worth  living  ?  No  !  The  question  is  not  debat- 
able. There  is  no  use  in  any  man's  worrying 
himself  to  write  a  book  upon  it. 

The  written  words  of  all  our  literature,  our 
brave,  honest,  manful  English  speech,  in  History 
and  Poetry,  in  Law  and  Ballad  and  the  people's 
Songs,  in  Science  and  in  Romance,  from  Saxon 
Caedmon  to  Saxon  Thackeray,  has  one  utterance 
only  and  one  conviction — Life  is  worth  just  the 
truth  and  honor,  the  faith  and  valor  it  holds,  for 
God's  service  and  for  man's. 

The  life  that  bread  can  preserve,  or  the  want 
of  bread  destroy,  our  Shepherds  and  Kings  of 
Men,  from  truth-speaking  Saxon  Alfred  to  truth- 
speaking  Saxon  Lincoln,  have  all  held  and  taught, 
is  worth  just  the  good  sacrifice  you  can  make  of 
it  for  something  better ! 

The  words  of  Christ,  as  I  must  say  so  often, 
are    words    of    power — living,    abiding,    creative 


146  BREAD. 

words.  They  are  infinite  words  and  inexhausti- 
ble by  men.  One  man  finds  his  need  in  them. 
Another  his  and  a  totally  different  need.  So 
races  and  peoples  find  each  their  meaning  of 
power. 

And  it  came  to  ours  to  find  a  large  gospel  in 
this  utterance  in  the  wilderness.  A  rough,  un- 
couth, savage  sort  of  Christians  were  our  fathers 
for  many  years.  A  good  many  of  their  sons  re- 
main so.  But  they  did  sqq  in  the  Child  of  Beth- 
lehem, in  the  Man  of  Nazareth,  from  the  first,  a 
true  King  and  Master,  a  dauntless  Hero,  a  cour- 
ageous Lord  and  Leader  for  free-born  men. 

That  side  of  the  revelation  of  life  came  to 
them.  They  grasped  it  from  the  first,  and  their 
bravest  and  best  they  have  always  held,  wherever 
their  tongue  is  spoken,  are  the  men  who  can  die, 
but  cannot  lie,  the  men  whose  lives  are  in  their 
hands,  as  the  Eternal  Man's  was,  for  God's  glory 
or  Man's  good! 

"  Man  doth  not  live  by  bread  only."  "  I  will 
starve  but  I  will  not  lose  mine  integrity.  I  dare 
to  be  poor.  I  dare  to  suffer  want  and  physical 
distress.  I  covet  no  man's  bread.  I  am  sure  I 
will  not  touch  the  Devil's!  The  good  Father 
has  put  me  here  to  hold  my  place  and  do  my 
work  and  I  discharge  myself  of  all  responsibility 


BREAD,  147 

in  the  matter.  If  He  chooses  to  let  me  starve, 
die  here  in  the  wilderness,  and  let  the  jackals 
and  the  vultures  bury  me,  that  is  His  affair.  But 
that  is  better  than  to  turn  knave,  mean  liar,  thief, 
and  scoundrel  and  feed  on  royal  dainties  as  the 
Devil's  lackey !  " 

It  is  these  lackeys  of  the  Devil  who  are  the  ruin 
of  us!  These  poor,  cowardly,  crawling  creatures 
who  lick  his  feet  for  the  refuse  of  his  kitchen  ! 
They  dare  not  be  honest,  and  eat  brown  bread. 
They  dare  not  live  in  plain  houses,  and  walk  in 
homespun.  "  Plain  living  and  high  thinking  " — 
"  gone,"  you  say  ?  Yes,  and  vulgar  living  and  no 
thinking  at  all  come  in  their  place,  and  the  smell 
of  the  eternal  stoke-hole  upon  the  scraps  they 
have  sold  their  poor  souls  for! 

Some  of  them  are  rich,  live  in  fine  houses,  have 
abundance  of  bread  of  the  very  best  quality. 
Some  of  them  are  poor,  do  not  live  very  well 
after  all,  and  have  small  allowance.  But  all  are 
alike  in  this,  that  they  believe  man  lives  by  bread 
only,  that  he  is  an  animal,  and  the  slave  of  his 
palate,  stomach,  or  back,  and  the  worst  thing 
that  can  happen  to  him  is  to  have  his  carcase  un- 
comfortable! 

There  is  not  a  hair-breadth's  difference  among 
them  all,  nothing  to  chose  between  the  fine  lady 


148  BREAD. 

in  her  satins,  and  her  waiting-maid,  between  the 
rich  man  at  his  wine,  and  the  butler  who  cheats 
him  or  steals  from  him,  if  they  expect  their  bread 
from  the  Devil  and  not  from  God,  if  they  take 
their  little  animal  lives  for  the  dearest  and  most 
precious  things  they  know! 

There  is  a  general  grading  going  on  all  the 
time  among  men.  God  levels  men  up.  The 
Devil  levels  them  down  servant  and  master,  rich 
and  poor,  maid  and  mistress.  Under  either  pro- 
cess, there  is  not  much  to  choose  between  them 
after  a  while. 

"A  nation  of  shopkeepers."  It  was  a  sneer 
about  England.  It  may  be  a  more  biting  sneer 
about  America.  We  are  a  dickering,  swopping, 
buying,  selling,  bargaining  people  beyond  any 
that  ever  existed.  The  typical  American  has 
become  "  a  Drummer !  " 

Do  you  wonder  that  high-hearted  people  have 
always  looked  with  a  little  contempt  on  "  shop- 
keeping" — notwithstanding  the  fact  that  it  is  the 
universal  business  of  America  and  England, 
and  that  very  good  men  sell  tape  and  needles  ? 

There  is  nothing  necessarily  lowering  or  un- 
manly in  buying  and  selling,  in  keeping  shop  or 
making  merchandise.  It  is,  in  these  days,  an  oc- 
cupation fast  developing  into  pre-eminence.     It 


BREAD.  /4g 

has  gotten  its  mean  name,  because  it  has  been  so 
largely  meanly  conducted,  and  the  Devil  has 
been  so  close  a  councillor  behind  the  counter, 
and  at  the  day-book  and  ledger,  and  it  deserves 
its  contempt. 

Why  should  you  find  sneers,  in  all  our  litera- 
ture, about  the  family  that  makes  pretensions  to 
position  socially,  because  the  grandfather  was  a 
dealer  in  soap  and  candles  ?  There  are  no  sneers 
if  the  grandfather  was  a  sailor,  a  miner,  an  en- 
gineer, a  blacksmith.  Why  should  we  find  the 
sneer  has  a  point  because  it  is  a  question  of  soap 
and  candles  ?  Soap  and  candles  are  good  enough 
in  their  places. 

The  reason  is  that  "  trade  "  is  suspected  of  ser- 
vility, falsehood,  meanness,  knavery,  that  the 
Devil's  whisper  to  make  bread  in  his  way  is  nearer 
to  the  man  of  the  day-book  than  to  him  on  the 
yard-arm  in  an  Atlantic  gale,  or  him  in  the  mine 
with  fire-damp  and  like  dangers  round  him ! 

There  is  no  use  of  complaining.  It  is  the  race 
instinct.  And  it  is  the  salt  that  saves  the  race. 
We  honor  the  occupations  of  danger,  the  activi- 
ties that  have  an  ideal,  the  business  where  life 
risks  itself!  We  do  not  honor  the  shop-keeper, 
pawn-broker,  or  "  drummer  "  as  such. 

Stand  on  "the  bridge,"  some  night,  in  "half  a 


ISO 


BREAD. 


gale,"  when  the  great  "  ocean  greyhound  "  roars 
through  the  Atlantic  surges,  and  sends  the  salt 
foam  flying  to  her  maintop;  sit  in  the  engine 
"  cab,"  when  the  locomotive  thunders  through 
the  darkness  of  a  wild  winter  night,  and  in  the 
sailor  pacing  the  bridge  with  you,  in  the  stalwart, 
clear-eyed,  engineer  standing  beside  you,  you  will 
find  the  types  of  human  activities  that  the  men 
of  our  blood  recognize  as  manly. 

Rough  Christians  both  of  them !  Yes,  but  they 
both  believe,  when  the  crash  comes  of  a  collision 
in  mid-Atlantic,  and  the  great  racer  has  plowed 
half  way  through  a  sinking  ship,  and  the  order 
is  "  boats  away,"  or  when  the  engine  sways  and 
rocks  upon  a  track  washed  out — they  both  be- 
lieve, and  stand  on  reeling  deck  and  rushing  en- 
gine— in  that  faith,  "  Man  doth  not  live  by  bread 
only."  They  will  each  die  that  other  men  may 
live. 

Now,  some  day,  we  will  carry  out  our  "  busi- 
ness "  in  the  same  heroic  fashion.  We  will  man- 
ufacture, we  will  buy  and  sell  and  deal  with  €ach 
other  in  the  same  temper  and  with  the  same 
heroism  we  have  displayed  upon  our  battle-fields. 

Believing  in  God  who  rules  the  world,  and  rolls 
the  ages  on,  I  believe  the  day  is  coming  when  we 
shall  recognize  ourselves  as  Sons  of  God.     Our 


BREAD. 


151 


lives  in  our  hands  for  the  weak,  the  falHng,  the 
ignorant,  the  sorely  tried,  when,  chivalrous  gener- 
osity shall  rule  in  shop  and  factory,  when  we 
shall  recognize  the  common  brotherhood,  and 
fight  the  fight  out  shoulder  to  shoulder  every- 
where. 

"  Courage,  brethren !  What  will  they  say  at 
home  if  we  yield  ?  "  Yes!  "  What  will  God  and 
the  angels  say  ?  What  will  the  Elder  Brother 
say  ?  We  dart;  not  fail !  Stand  fast!  We  do 
not  live  by  bread  alone  !  " 

After  all,  the  wilderness  is  an  abundant  place. 
The  Father  has  supplied  raw  material  for  all  His 
children's  needs.  There  should  be  no  man  hun- 
gry, no  shivering  child,  no  homeless  wanderer 
found  on  earth.  Supper  and  lodging  to-night, 
breakfast  to-morrow,  is  every  honest  man's  claim. 
"  I  have  been  young  and  now  am  old  and  yet 
saw  I  never  the  righteous  forsaken,  nor  his  seed 
begging  their  bread."  The  Law  of  Heredity,  you 
see,  announced  very  definitely  some  centuries 
before  Mr.  Darwin  guessed  about  it. 

And  the  Law  holds.  The  ideal  civilization 
must  be  built  upon  it.  The  stand  the  Man  took 
in  the  Wilderness  is  the  foundation  rock  to  build 
upon. 

"  I  am  the  Son  of  God.     I  can  make  bread  out 


152  BREAD. 

of  stones.  It  is  my  prerogative  and  birth-right. 
No  devil  can,  not  the  smallest  burnt  cake!  My 
Father  owns  this  land  and  has  given  it  to  me,  and 
whether  I  am  hungry  or  feasting  is  no  business 
of  yours.  That  is  a  matter  between  my  Father 
and  myself.  I  certainly  won't  take  lessons  in 
bread-making  from  you.  Away  with  you!  With 
our  Father's  help  we  are  going  to  make  a  God's 
world,  abundant  and  fair,  out  of  this  wilderness." 
Our  questions — communism,  socialism,  rela- 
tions of  capital  and  labor,  of  rich  and  poor,  about 
which  foolish  men  "  looking  backward  "  or  looking 
forward  write  and  speak  foolish  twaddle,  can  be 
settled  and  settled  only  by  the  word  from  the 
Syrian  wilderness — 

"  Man  doth  not  live  by  bread  only, 

But  by  every  word  that  proceedeth  from  the  mouth  of  God 
Doth  man  live." 


LECTURE   V. 
KINGDOMS. 


"  Again,  the  Devil  taketh  Jiini  tip  into  an  exceeding  high  mount- 
ain, and  shewcth  him  all  the  kingdoms  of  the  woi-ld  and  the  glory 
of  them  ;  and  saith  unto  him.  All  these  things  will  I  give  thee,  if 
thou  wilt  fall  dozen  and  worship  me," 

Matthew,  iv.  8,  9. 


LECTURE   V. 
KINGDOMS. 

WHEN  man  upon  the  earth  has  won  his  way 
to  the  supply  of  all  his  animal  needs,  he 
has  but  begun  to  feel  the  larger  wants  which  be- 
long to  him  as  an  intellectual  being. 

Here  he  seems  to  part  entirely  from  the  crea- 
tures with  whom  so  far  he  has  had  much  in  com- 
mon. 

He,  like  them,  has  needed  food  for  his  physical 
hunger.  He  has,  indeed,  differed  widely  from 
them,  in  the  method  of  obtaining  it;  indeed 
in  all  the  conditions  that  concern  it,  but  he  and 
they  have  alike  needed  it.  But  this  obtained, 
the  man,  and  the  mere  animal  part  company.  Its 
stomach  filled  the  animal  is  satisfied.  Its  highest 
need  has  been  supplied.  It  lies  content  until  the 
imperious  call  of  hunger  sets  it  foraging  or  hunt- 
ing again. 

The  lowest  type  of  man  is  low  and  remains 
low,  as  it  remains  content  with  this  same  content. 


156  KINGDOMS. 

The  race  satisfied  with  physical  abundance  for 
the  day,  with  every  felt  want  supplied,  when  it  is 
sheltered,  covered,  and  comfortably  fed,  is  a  race 
very  low  down  in  the  scale  of  humanity. 

With  the  higher  types  of  men,  the  supply  of 
bodily  need  is  only  a  vantage  gained  for  the  sup- 
ply of  other  needs  which  are  quite  as  imperious 
and  which  spring  at  once  into  power  and  clam- 
orous utterance,  when  the  sufficient  bread  is  at- 
tained. 

There  is  no  gulf  leaped  either  in  this  case. 
One  thing  grows  out  of  another,  in  orderly  devel- 
opment of  course.  Leisure  given  from  mere 
bread  getting,  spends  itself  in  bettering  the 
bread.  The  hut  once  built  and  made  a  sufificient 
shelter  against  storm  and  cold  and  wet,  made 
cheerful  as  a  human  nest  of  reasonable  bodily 
comfort,  becomes  soon  a  home,  and  man  adds 
this  touch  of  beauty  here,  and  that  bit  of  refine- 
ment there,  having  time  and  means  now,  and  the 
hut  is  on  the  high  road  to  become  a  palace. 

The  log  structure  in  a  Greek  forest  held 
the  prophecy  of  the  Parthenon.  The  wattled 
churches  of  Augustine,  in  the  rude  realm  of  Ethel- 
bert,  contained  the  effectual  germ  of  the  Cathe- 
dral of  Canterbury. 

The    necessity   of    mastering    nature    in    some 


KINGDOMS.  157 

degree,  in  order  to  get  the  plainest  bread,  devel- 
ops a  habit  in  man,  and,  having  gotten  the  bread, 
he  goes  on  instinctively,  as  it  were,  upon  the 
same  road,  mastering  her  for  more  and  better 
bread,  till  the  rude  meal  of  parched  corn  and 
pulse  becomes  a  Lord  Mayor's  banquet,  and  the 
sheltering  hut  in  the  forest  grows  into  a  palace 
of  marble  and  bronze. 

But  the  bodily  needs,  no  matter  how  abun- 
dantly, luxuriously,  and  magnificently  supplied, 
merge  themselves  into  intellectual  needs  which 
in  their  turn  are  quite  as  hungry  and  compelling. 

Man  must  know  the  rationale  of  things.  He 
is  compelled  to  make  things  logical.  His  first 
and  still  his  surest  science  is  the  science  of  mea- 
surement and  of  number.  He  will  build  his 
house  by  count,  by  rule  and  line.  He  will  lay 
the  base  of  his  pyramid  "  four  square  to  every 
wind  that  blows."  There  is  a  compulsion  on  him 
to  mete  and  bound  by  line  and  angle  the  acres 
of  his  fields,  the  square  feet  of  his  garden.  Reason, 
order,  beauty,  the  harmony  of  things,  become 
parts  of  his  quest,  as  soon  as  that  of  sufficient 
bread  is  satisfied. 

Hence  rise  "  the  kingdoms  of  the  world,  and 
the  glory  of  them  "  more  or  less. 

The   Son  of  God   in   the  wilderness   is   royal. 


158  KINGDOMS. 

He  has  the  hungry  heart  of  the  conqueror.  He 
becomes  conscious  of  His  power  and  His  rights. 
The  wilderness  is  not  a  lair  of  wild  beasts,  or  a 
nest  of  dragons.  There  are  strange  forces  in  it. 
There  are  wonderfully  beautiful  creations  which 
suggest  still  more  beauty.  There  are  many 
things  to  be  discovered  in  it,  many  things  to  be 
mastered  and  enjoyed,  when  once  you  have  dis- 
covered how,  in  tolerably  satisfactory  fashion,  to 
make  bread  out  of  stones. 

You  may  cut  gems  from  its  rocks.  You  may 
carve  porphyry  columns  from  these  splintered 
crags.  The  very  sand  may  be  melted  into  crys- 
tal. Treasures  lie  in  these  ragged  clefts.  There 
are  a  thousand  things  to  be  gotten  beside  mere 
bread,  when  one  has  mastered  the  situation. 

But  the  situation  must  be  mastered.  Indeed, 
in  order  to  have  a  reasonably  satisfactory  cer- 
tainty of  bread  you  must  establish  a  kingdom, 
some  expression  of  reason,  and  embodiment  of 
order,  some  power  of  personal  will  amid  blind 
force,  some  rules  to  order  even  that  personal  will, 
and  some  methods  by  which  it  shall  act  and  react 
upon  itself  and  the  material. 

In  the  mount  of  vision  the  Son  of  God  stands 
with  the  temptation.  All  the  kingdoms  of  the 
world,  and  their  glory,  pass  in   His  review  "in  a 


KINGDOMS.  159 

moment  of  time."  They  are  the  outward  expres- 
sions of  human  sovereignty  over  the  world,  as 
far  as  such  sovereignty  has  attained. 

Past,  present,  and  the  time  to  come  all  are 
spread  before  the  Man  in  the  wilderness;  all  that 
ever  have  been  or  ever  will  be  seen  by  man,  are 
in  vision  here  of  the  Man  who  was  and  is  infinite 
and  eternal. 

The  golden  domes  gleam  in  the  mystic  light. 
The  lofty  towers  flash  back  the  splendors.  The 
pillared  courts,  the  long  vast  colonnades,  swim 
away  in  the  golden  haze.  Temples  and  palaces 
and  sweeping  walls  loom  through  the  light  of  the 
wondrous  vision. 

Nineveh,  and  Babylon  with  its  gardens  in  the 
clouds.  The  avenues  of  sphinxes,  the  pyramids 
of  the  Nile,  the  pillared  grandeurs  of  Persepolis, 
"  the  vast  Akrokeraunian  walls,"  the  snowy  won- 
der of  the  Athenian  Akropolis,  and,  last  of  all, 
the  domed  glory  of  the  Lady  of  all  Kingdoms, 
throned  on  her  seven-hilled  seat. 

And  not  these  only.  All  that  is  to  be!  Paris 
and  Berlin  and  New  York,  and  London  with  the 
thousand  masts  of  Thames! 

The  temples  of  their  religion,  the  magnificence 
of  their  capitols,  the  palaces  of  their  learning,  the 
dim   vastness    of    their   libraries,   where    human 


i6o  KINGDOMS. 

thought  is  hoarded  for  the  coming  years,  the 
wealth  of  their  storehouses,  the  power  of  their 
gHttering  legions,  the  roar  of  their  thunders  on 
the  deep,  the  fire-driven  car,  rushing  across  the 
continents,  the  iron  leviathan  sweeping  through 
the  cataracts  of  the  wild  seas — all  the  kingdoms 
established  by  man  over  natural  forces,  and  the 
untrained  and  untamed  resistances  of  the  earth, 
pass  in  the  field  of  this  wonderful  vision  on  the 
mountain. 

Now,  first  of  all,  remember  the  Son  of  God 
came  expressly  to  get  these  kingdoms.  That 
was  His  mission  and  business  on  earth.  To  make 
all  these  the  kingdoms  of  God  was  the  end. 

There  is  no  sin  then  in  wanting  the  kingdoms 
of  this  world.  Indeed,  to  get  possession  of  all 
that  are,  and  to  build  new,  is  the  purpose  of  an 
ordered  rational  human  life. 

The  fault  of  your  savage,  the  degradation  of 
your  barbarian,  the  wretched  and  shameful  re- 
trogression of  the  dregs  of  your  civilization  is 
that  they  have  ceased  this  divine  quest  of  king- 
doms. 

As  the  Son  of  God,  man  is  a  kingdom  con- 
queror, or  a  kingdom  maker  by  necessity  of  his 
nature.  Kingdoms  of  comfort,  kingdoms  of  in- 
telligence,   kingdoms    of    power,    kingdoms     of 


KINGDOMS.  l6l 

beauty  and  grace,  kingdoms  of  order  and  law — 
he  is  seeking  them  continually  or  he  is  failing  in 
the  purpose  of  his  mission. 

And  many  of  them  are  kingdoms  in  the  land  of 
vision.  Indeed,  there  first  he  sees  them.  Their 
mystic  glories  swim  before  his  tranced  eyes  to 
lead  him  on.  The  real  kingdom  has  never  yet 
approached  his  ideal.  His  eyes  are  enchanted 
by  the  vision.  The  land  is  a  far  land  yet  in  which 
the  glory  of  his  kingdoms  lies,  and  the  wilderness 
about  him  is  bare  and  desolate.  But  the  glories 
of  the  mount  of  vision,  "  the  exceeding  high 
mountain "  which  venturous  human  thought 
climbs,  and  where  human  imagination  rests  and 
sweeps  the  horizon  of  all  knowledge  and  all  ex- 
pectation of  all  that  has  been,  and  all  that  might 
be,  is  far  above  the  wilderness,  and  there  the 
watcher  and  the  spiritual  powers  are  alone  to- 
gether. 

It  is  no  longer  a  question  of  a  poor  loaf  of 
bread,  when  man,  the  intelligence,  awakens.  He 
who  wanted,  down  yonder,  only  a  meal  for  his 
hunger  in  the  wilderness,  now  wants  all  royalties 
and  all  crowns.  The  nearer  the  heights,  the 
more  the  imperial  nature  asserts  itself,  and  its 
demand  for  empire. 

Yes,   kingdoms  arc  what   we  seek!    and  king- 


1 62  KINGDOMS. 

doms  in  the  land  of  vision!  The  humblest  of 
us  wants,  at  least,  the  kingdom  of  home.  The 
vision  haunts  the  men  of  our  blood,  and  it  is  a 
vision  of  power.  One  small  spot,  which  is  ours, 
where  we  are  master  and  lord,  a  little  walled-in 
sacred  kingdom  where  the  sceptre  is  love,  and 
the  throne  a  chair  of  benediction,  and  the  crown, 
a  crown  of  blessing.  We  would  gather  into  that 
dear  kingdom  those  we  are  called  upon  to  care 
for,  to  shelter  and  guide.  To  us  and  them  it  is 
sacred  from  all  the  world.  It  walls  out  armies 
of  ugly  enemies,  bestial  or  diabolic.  Disorder, 
selfishness,  greed,  lust,  cruelty,  hatred,  malignity, 
the  coarse  beasts  of  the  wilderness,  assail  our 
dear  kingdom  in  vain. 

We  would  build  it,  and  order  it,  and  guard  all 
its  walls,  arm  all  its  towers,  and  have,  by  day  and 
night,  the  wardens  set  by  love,  challenge  the 
hours  as  they  pass,  with  the  cry — "all  is  well!  " 

We  want  the  kingdom  of  knowledge.  We 
would  enter  into  the  powers  and  magnificences 
of  that  realm  of  Light  which  men  have  won  by ' 
the  patient  toil  of  centuries  from  the  ancient 
Dark.  It  is  the  noblest  of  us  who  seek  for 
crowns  and  thrones  and  sceptres  there,  the  no- 
blest, and  yet  always  the  humblest.  But  the  re- 
ward of  the   conquest  is  glorious!     To  tread,  as 


KINGDOMS.  163 

Prince  and  Master,  the  long  halls  where  the  lords 
of  the  human  mind  have  left  us  their  treasures 
without  price.  To  walk  conscious  that  we  are 
their  legitimate  heirs,  that  we  shame  not  our 
high  estate  or  their  royal  names,  that  we,  too, 
are  born  to  the  purple  of  intellectual  dignity, 
children  of  the  light  and  humble  allies  at  least  of 
the  imperial  thinkers,  the  laureled  torch-bearers 
of  all  time! 

Some  of  us  want  the  kingdom  of  the  world's 
resources.  We  want  the  thrones  of  gold,  and 
the  diamond  sceptre,  not  because  we  care  for  the 
throne,  we  prefer  a  leather-covered  ofifice-chair; 
not  the  sceptre,  for  a  stout  walking  stick  or  a 
serviceable  umbrella  suits  us  better!  But  we 
want  the  kingdom  of  power  of  which  great 
wealth  and  abounding  business  success  hold  the 
keys. 

Our  ships  should  cast  their  shadow  upon  every 
sea.  Our  engines  should  pant  in  the  valley  and 
hammer  with  iron  arms  on  the  hillside  at  our 
command.  Our  wealth,  expression  of  our  power, 
should  lie  safe-stored,  subject  to  our  order  in 
many  vaults  of  proof.  Our  factories,  where  the 
rude  product  of  the  mine  or  the  field  is  beaten 
and  forged,  or  spun  and  woven  into  forms  of  use 
and   beauty,   should   split    the   darkness    of    the 


1 64  KINGDOMS. 

night  with  the  red  flash  of  their  many-windowed 
stories. 

We  would  have  a  kingdom  of  industry,  and 
would  be  crowned  in  that  kingdom.  We  would 
have  no  armies  to  lead  against  our  fellows,  but 
armies  trained  and,  under  our  ready  orders,  armed 
with  tools  against  want  and  poverty,  against  idle- 
ness and  waste,  armies  to  carry  the  standard  of 
our  estate  still  farther  into  the  dark  realms  of 
waste  and  want  and  the  world's  disorder,  and 
conquer  there,  under  our  leadership,  wider  prov- 
inces for  human  homes,  for  human  industry  and 
order,  and  for  plenty  and  comfort  as  their  due 
reward. 

And  I  dare  to  say  that  all  these  kingdoms  are 
legitimate  inheritances  of  men.  They  are  all 
supremely  human.  Again  we  face  a  differentia- 
tion infinite,  between  the  creatures  native  to  the 
wilderness  and  the  unique  creature  who  has 
been  led  up  into  it. 

The  kingdoms  are  his.  But  he  is  not  in  pos- 
session. They  wait  to  be  won.  He  is  there  to 
win  them,  to  make  them  human  kingdoms  and 
divine.  We  have  considered  none  for  which  it  is 
not  manly  and  gentle  and  becoming  in  the  Son 
of  God  to  seek,  indeed  which  it  is  not  his  bounden 
duty  and   ethical  obligation   in  the  wilderness  to 


KINGDOMS.  165 

seek  with  all  his  power.  But  there  are  other 
kingdoms  beside. 

We  want,  some  of  us,  the  kingdom  of  power 
over  our  fellows.  We  desire  to  lead  and  order 
men  in  their  corporate  condition  as  nations  and 
peoples.  We  want  the  throne  of  authority  and 
the  sceptre  of  command.  The  home  is  too  nar- 
row for  us,  the  realms  of  knowledge  too  ideal. 
We  want  our  word  to  be  not  merely  instructive 
and  persuading,  but  authoritative,  law  or  the 
making  of  law  for  other  men.  We  would  have 
our  wisdom  confessed  in  human  act,  and  our 
opinion  crystallized  in  human  obedience.  We 
would  sit  upon  the  heights  of  our  time  and  send 
our  orders  to  ring  amid  fleets  and  armies,  and 
fill  the  echoes  of  the  coming  world. 

It  is  the  most  fascinating,  to  some  at  least,  this 
Kingdom  of  Power.  It  is  the  only  kingdom 
which  history,  the  judgment  of  mankind,  has 
thought  worthy  of  the  name.  And  it  is  a  high 
quest.  To  rule  men  is  a  grand  calling.  It  brings 
humanity  nearest  to  the  divine.  It  was  not  un- 
natural, but  natural  that  kings  should  be  held 
"  hedged  with  a  divinity."  They  expressed,  in  a 
way,  the  supreme  sovereignty.  They,  in  a  way, 
stood  for  the  master  of  the  world.  They  repre- 
sented authority,  and  law  and  order,  and  ranked 


1 66  KINGDOMS. 

gradation  and  due  place  and  bounden  duty  among 
men.  Obedience  became  loyalty.  And  loyalty 
became  a  passion.  And  even  in  our  latter  days, 
when  we  have  constitutional  kings,  deriving  au- 
thority from  the  people,  and  from  no  divine  or 
hereditary  right,  still  the  king  stands  for  the 
people,  symbolizes  the  majesty  and  the  unity  of 
the  national  will,  and  as  chief  magistrate  is  sacred. 

Which  of  us  will  dare  to  say  that  it  is  an  evil 
thing  to  desire  the  Kingdom  of  Power,  or  a  share 
of  it  ?  Where  is  the  wrong  or  crime  in  the  wish  to 
govern  men,  control  their  movements,  command 
their  obedience,  so  only  it  be  in  wise  ways,  helpful, 
orderly,  profitable  to  themselves  and  others  ? 

And  vast  power  among  the  nations?  Is  it 
wrong  to  seek  the  exercise  of  such  power  if  a 
man  is  conscious  he  can  exercise  it  wisely,  and 
seeks  by  wielding  it  to  beat  down  chaos  and  an- 
archy, and  build  order  and  peace,  to  destroy  the 
evil  and  build  up  the  good,  and  make  more  and 
more  righteousness  and  truth  prosper  upon  the 
earth  ? 

"  Till  the  war-drum  throbs  no  longer,  and  the  battle  flags  are  furled, 
In  the  Parliament  of  man  the  Federation  of  the  world." 

I  think  we  shall  have  to  admit  that  political 
ambitions,  the  strong  desire  to  rise  upon  the 
thrones  of  power,  and  wield,  in  whole  or  part,  a 


KINGDOMS.  167 

great  nation's  forces,  guide  a  great  nation's  ways, 
and  speak  with  the  voice  of  a  thousand  cannon, 
and  in  the  roar  of  a  hundred  iron-clads,  speak 
with  all  the  thunder  of  a  great  imperial  People  in 
his  words,  is  an  entirely  legitimate  human  ambi- 
tion, and  a  thing  a  man  may  seek  and  work  for, 
and  yet  say  his  prayers,  and  look  for  the  blessing 
of  God  upon  his  endeavors. 

And  there  is  the  kingdom  of  culture  and  art. 
A  frivolous  kingdom  as  many  good  men  count  it, 
and  against  which  much  assault  is  made  by  them 
in  the  name  of  God.  It  is  an  enchanting  king- 
dom. Its  gardens  are  full  of  the  songs  the  poets 
sing  of  all  things  that  have  been  or  will  be.  The 
crowns  are  laurel  there.  The  palace  walls  are 
alive  with  creations  on  canvas  more  enduring 
than  their  makers.  The  terraces  are  peopled  by 
silent  but  immortal  forms  of  grace  and  beauty. 
All  music  is  in  the  air,  and  fills  the  heart  with 
rapture  and  the  echoes  of  harmonies  never  heard 
by  living  ears.  All  beauty  is  there  in  sculptured 
permanence,  in  soaring  architecture,  and  on  glow- 
ing canvas.  The  royal  portals  open  wide  upon 
that  world  of  splendid  shadows  which  yet  is  the 
world  of  truest  realities.  The  air  is  filled  with 
sights  and  sounds  which  never  were  on  earth  or 
any  sea. 


l68  KINGDOMS. 

And  the  high  souls  dwell  there,  themselves 
their  own  companions.  Kings,  all,  over  the 
realm  of  men's  souls.  Homer,  Dante,  Shakes- 
peare, Milton  sing,  Angelo  carves  and  paints  and 
builds,  Raffael  beside  him,  and  the  harps  and 
organs  answer  to  the  touch  of  Mozart  and  Men- 
delssohn. 

A  bit  of  that  fairy  kingdom  for  your  own  ? 
Any  harm  in  that  ?  Thence  the  wild  creatures 
have  fled  forever.  There  is  nothing  bestial  there. 
It  is,  of  all  the  kingdoms,  the  human  kingdom,  so 
it  be  ordered  by  the  Sons  of  God.  They  dwell 
there,  the  men  we  know  and  love,  and  their  gen- 
tle faces  are  full  of  welcome  to  their  kingdom  of 
beauty  and  peace. 

Nay,  all  these  kingdoms  are  ours  for  the  win- 
ning, with  due  obedience  and  reverence  to  our 
Father  whose  they  are. 

The  temptation  was  not,  you  will  observe,  to 
win  the  kingdoms  of  the  world.  It  was  to  win 
them  in  a  particular  way. 

The  Devil  lied.  The  Lord  Jesus  had  come 
to  the  earth,  as  I  have  said,  was  in  the  wilderness, 
indeed,  on  a  specific  mission.  It  was  to  make 
the  kingdoms  of  the  world,  "  all  these  things," 
His  own. 

There  was  a  long,  hard  road  before  Him  ere 


KINGDOMS.  169 

the  end  could  be  attained.  It  would  end  in  the 
bloody  sweat  of  Gethsemane,  Pilate's  judgment 
hall,  the  hill  of  Calvary.  Seeking  the  kingdoms 
of  the  world  in  one  way,  He  would  have  a  reed  for 
His  sceptre,  a  crown  of  thorns,  and  a  cross  dyed 
purple  with  His  own  blood  for  His  enthronement. 

And  even  so,  and  at  the  end,  the  conquest 
would  be  but  begun.  Through  long  ages  after, 
the  kingdoms  of  the  world  would  be  filled  with 
the  dark  places  of  cruelty,  tyranny,  uncleanness, 
and  lust.  Human  cries  would  pierce  the  heavens 
in  the  shrill  torture  of  men's  slow  suffering. 
Their  pale  hands  would  lift  to  the  dumb  sky,  ap- 
pealing against  the  devilishness  reigning  in  the 
kingdoms  of  the  earth.  From  rack  and  dungeon, 
from  scaffold,  stake,  and  faggot,  from  fields  of 
senseless  slaughter,  from  burning  roof-trees  and 
hearths  hissing  with  the  father's  blood,  from  the 
roads  where  starving  babes  wailed  for  their  dead 
mothers,  still,  from  age  to  age,  through  the  creep- 
ing centuries,  would  the  pallid,  pitiful  faces  of 
human  agony  look  to  the  cold  sky  that  gave  back 
no  sign. 

The  Man  in  the  wilderness  knew  all  this.  These 
Kingdoms  of  the  World  would  still  go  on.  Devil 
fashion  and  brute  fashion,  for  ages  to  come,  and 
all  His  effort  be  to  sip"ht  in  vain. 


I70  KINGDOMS. 

Yea,  men  would  see  it,  and  sneer  and  mock 
and  point  to  Him  as  a  failure,  ask  "  Where  is  the 
Kingdom  of  God  He  promised,"  and  stagger  the 
faith  of  His  few  friends  by  pointing  to  Him  as 
one  who  had  promised  much  and  performed  lit- 
tle, a  king  without  a  kingdom ! 

And  here  came  in  the  Temptation.  "All  these 
things  will  I  give  thee,  if  thou  wilt  fall  down  and 
worship  me."  Victory  is  promised  at  once.  The 
purpose  of  the  coming  will  be  fulfilled  with  no 
waiting.  The  toil,  the  pain,  the  heavy  heart  of 
disappointment,  the  sickness  of  hope  deferred  will 
all  be  spared  Him,  and  the  world  will  be  so  much 
the  sooner  ransomed. 

Such  was  the  Temptation.  Such  is  the  Temp- 
tation. And  men  since  the  world  began  have 
yielded.  They  have  been  cheated  by  lies.  "All 
these  things  will  I  give  thee  if  thou  wilt  fall  down 
and  worship  me."  The  Devil  claims  them  and 
men  befooled  admit  his  claim. 

They  have  taken  the  Kingdom  of  Home  at  his 
hands.  They  took  it  with  polygamy  in  earlier 
days,  and  they  take  it  with  divorce  now.  It  is 
only  a  kingdom  of  the  world  at  best.  A  mere 
civil  contract  makes  it.  It  is  invaded  by  lust 
and  selfishness,  its  gates  and  walls  broken  down, 


KINGDOMS,  1 7 1 

and  all  its  realm  laid  desolate  by  the  invasions  of 
selfish  passion  and  animal  desires. 

There  stands  Marriage  and  the  Home,  the  cen- 
tral cradle  and  citadel  of  human  life  upon  the 
Earth,  and  Evil  has  claimed  it  from  the  first,  and 
its  joys  have  been  declared  gifts  of  the  Devil. 
Men  have  sought  a  kingdom  there,  and,  taking  it 
at  the  hands  of  the  Devil,  failing  to  see  the 
divine  meaning  and  purpose  in  it,  or  denying  it 
if  they  did,  they  have  anarchy  and  brutality  in- 
stead. 

Entering  upon  that  fair  kingdom  with  no  sense 
of  the  high  consecration  its  sceptre  and  crown 
demand,  seating  themselves  upon  its  throne  as  a 
seat  held  from  the  world  or  the  Devil  for  the  sake 
of  human  desire  or  human  self-interest,  they  have 
debauched  the  home,  and  what  wonder  that  we 
find,  under  many  a  roof,  instead  of  the  ideal 
family  of  a  Son  of  God,  a  lair  merely  of  foul,  low, 
brutal  creatures  that  shelter  there  in  sullen  ill- 
will  or  snarling  ill-temper.  The  natural  instinct 
is  nearly  all  that  is  left,  and  the  doctrine  that  the 
marriage  bond  is  a  merely  civil  (felt  to  be  often- 
times a  very  iinoAwW)  contract,  and  dissolvable 
almost  at  the  parties'  will,  is  the  shame  and  men- 
ace of  our  country. 

No  wonder  that  in  homes  on  such  a  basis  the 


172  KINGDOMS. 

voice  of  prayer  is  silent,  that  the  household  meals 
are  as  unblessed  by  any  acknowledgment  of  God 
as  the  feeding  of  beasts,  that  the  father  goes  to 
one  "  church  "  and  the  mother  to  another,  and 
the  children  perhaps  to  none  at  all ;  that  religious 
instruction  is  never  given  in  such  homes,  and 
that,  as  more  and  more  the  home  is  shattered  and 
its  interests  divided,  to  protect  the  weak  party  in 
its  organization,  our  wise  legislators  should  more 
and  more  make  the  husband's  and  the  wife's  in- 
terests separate,  and  that  crank  reformers  should 
propose  to  take  the  wife  out  of  the  diabolic 
homes  we  have  created  and  send  her  into  the 
streets  and  market  places  for  her  own  good ;  that 
indeed  our  blind  legislation  having  done  what  it 
could  to  destroy  the  home,  should  boldly  pro- 
ceed upon  the  theory  of  pure  savagery  in  its  ulti- 
mate form — that  the  unit,  namely,  of  Society  is 
not  the  Family,  as  our  race  has  held  for  twenty 
centuries,  but  the  individual,  with  his  or  her  mis- 
erable selfish  lusts  and  insanities!  Need  we  won- 
der that,  in  less  than  two  decades,  over  three 
hundred  and  twenty-eight  thousand  such  homes 
have  been  abolished  by  divorce  in  the  United 
States  ? 

Men  fall  down  and  worship  the  Devil  for  the 
kingdom  of  wealth.     They  look  not  for  control 


KINGDOMS.  173 

and  mastery  of  the  world's  resources  from  Him 
who  made  the  world  and  created  those  resources, 
but  from  the  lying  power  of  Evil  which  has 
spoiled  and  usurped  Heaven's  gifts  for  the  ser- 
vice of  Hell! 

Here  you  have  the- grinding  of  the  poor,  the 
cruel  covetousness  that  God  abhorreth,  and  which 
is  express  worship  of  the  Devil's  Eidolon,  the 
going  down  upon  their  knees  in  abject  fashion  to 
the  liar  who  has  imposed  his  lie  upon  them,  all 
the  meanness  of  the  shop,  all  the  fraud  of  the 
small  retail  knave,  all  the  sharp  dealing  of  the 
money-lender,  all  the  miserly  grasping  which 
destroys  the  grace  and  the  sweetness  of  life — ■ 
destroys  life  itself  in  getting  the  means  of  life — 
all  the  perversions  of  the  use  of  wealth  from  high 
and  noble  to  mean  and  selfish  uses — all  arise 
from  acceptance  of  this  first  lie,  that  the  Devil 
owns  the  world  and  its  kingdoms,  or  at  least  has  a 
mortgage  on  them,  and  if  a  man  would  get  his 
share  in  any  one  of  them,  he  must  do  suit  and 
service  therefor  to  Mammon  or  to  Beelzebub! 

For  entrance  to  the  kingdoms  of  art,  of  grace 
and  taste  and  beauty,  men  have  sued  at  the 
Tempter's  feet,  and  have  gone  in  and  profaned 
the  realm  that  should  be  the  fairest,  the  realm 
that  should  at  least  suggest  the  Paradise  of  God. 


174  KINGDOMS. 

Degradation  of  Art !  Can  we  expect  aught 
save  the  degradation  of  art,  when  it  is  taken  not 
as  a  high  service  of  God,  not  as  a  walled  king- 
dom sacred  to  Him,  but  as  a  kingdom  where  evil 
lusts  and  passions,  where  diabolic  suggestions 
and  even  diabolic  service  are  at  home  and  are  to 
be  served ! 

A  degraded  drama !  Of  course  a  degraded 
drama!  What  else  can  you  look  for  ?  It  should 
be  a  school  of  virtue.  It  should  utter,  as  indeed 
it  has,  the  noblest  and  purest  thoughts  of  men.  It 
was  never  meant  to  be  a  kingdom  of  the  Devil. 
It  need  not  be.  Is  Macbeth  or  Lear  a  literature 
of  Evil  ?  Foolish  words  are  said  for  and  against 
the  stage.  There  is  no  reconciliation.  There 
can  be  none  till  the  foundations  are  understood, 
that  here  is  a  broad  realm  of  one  of  the  kingdoms 
which  man  ought  to  hold  for  himself  and  God, 
and  which  instead  he  is  doing  the  Devil  service 
for! 

He  must  pay  this  little  bit  of  toll  to  Hell, 
this  piece  of  uncleanness,  this  equivoque,  this 
vile  suggestion,  or  he  cannot  hold  the  kingdom ! 

It  is  a  far  fall  from  Mozart  to  Offenbach,  as 
far  as  from  Handel  to  a  drunkard's  debauched 
song.  Yet  it  is  music  all  the  way.  What  makes 
the  difference  ?     It  is  the  old  difference,  and  the 


KINGDOMS.  175 

persistent  one.  Is  the  land  of  St.  Cecilia  a  divine 
Kingdom  or  a  diabolic  ?  To  possess  it  and  enjoy 
it  must  we  serve  God  or  serve  the  Devil  ?  To 
win  and  wear  its  sovereignty  must  we  fall  down 
and  worship,  with  drunken  catch,  and  harlot's 
song,  and  impious  mockery  of  purity  and  truth, 
Belial  and  our  own  lusts  ?  Or  is  it  a  high  king- 
dom kept  by  our  Father  and  to  be  given  by  Him 
to  the  labor  and  study,  and  reverent  care  of  His 
children  ?  A  kingdom  where  the  eternal  har- 
monies seek  utterance  at  the  hands  and  in  the 
voices  of  men,  a  kingdom  whose  air  is  thrilled 
once  and  again  with  notes  lost  from  the  harp- 
strings  of  the  angels,  dropped  echoes  of  the 
chants  from  the  choirs  invisible  ? 

One  looks  over  the  story  of  the  world,  and  all 
its  shames  and  half  its  sorrows,  all  its  debase- ^ 
ment  and  much  of  its  bitter  disappointment,  has 
come  from  the  great  surrender. 

The  fair  kingdoms  seen  on  the  mount  of  Vis- 
ion, meant  to  lead  to  high  endeavor  in  God's 
service  and  in  man's,  whose  glories  gleam  the 
brighter  in  the  land  of  the  ideal,  the  higher  on 
the  far  off  hills  they  flame  and  burn  and 
beckon,  these  fair  kingdoms  men  have  turned  to 
serve  the  Devil  for,  and  have  changed  the  splen- 
dors of  heaven  into  the  red  sjlare  of  the  Pit. 


176  KINGDOMS. 

The  earth's  ancient  kingdoms  rose  and  fell. 
Their  scattered  records  and  remains  are  left  us 
for  our  study.  The  one  fact  you  get  out  of  that 
study,  which  is  of  prime  use  and  importance  to 
thinking  men,  is  that  in  every  case  the  notion  was 
that  evil  was  supreme  on  earth,  and  kingdoms 
must  be  built  on  devil-service  to  be  strong. 

Hence  wars  of  mere  conquest,  wars  as  .evoid 
of  all  human  principle  as  the  hunting  of  a  pack 
of  wolves. 

Nimrod  was  "a  mighty  hunter  before  the 
Lord,"  and  the  first  to  covet  and  obtain  one  of 
these  kingdoms.  He  is  a  type  of  all  the  conquer- 
ors, "a  mighty  hunter  and  his  game  was  man." 

His  Assyrian  Kingdom,  Babylon  after,  the  Per- 
sian and  the  Mede,  "the  Macedonian  madman," 
Rome  when  it  leaves  its  first  estate  of  honest  in- 
dustry and  republican  toil — they  are  all  in  the 
same  line.  The  robber  Northmen,  our  ancestors, 
ravaging,  burning,  murdering  on  all  the  coast  of 
Europe;  Alaric  of  their  own  blood  before  them, 
and  Attila  the  Hun,  the  scourge  of  God,  the 
unspeakable  Turk  in  his  turn — all  the  kingdoms, 
one  may  say,  have  been  taken  and  accepted  and 
their  glory  sought  for  by  the  service  of  the  Devil. 
Almost  in  our  own  day,  darkening  the  sky  with  a 
lurid  hell-crlare  that  will  be  the  last  of  that  sort  the 


KINGDOMS.  177 

world  shall  see,  thank  God,  a  man,  the  last  of  a 
long  descent,  wanted  a  kingdom  in  the  old  fash- 
ion, saw  he  thought  his  way  to  get  it,  believed 
kingdoms  were  given  in  this  world  by  the  Devil, 
therefore  must  be  sought  and  upheld  by  blood- 
shed, cruelty,  and  lies;  declared  that  "God  was 
on  the  side  of  the  strongest  battalions  " ;  that  the 
Devil  was  God,  that  is,  of  this  world  at  least. 
And  when  his  schemes  went  to  wreck  one  stormy 
Sunday  in  Belgium,  and  he  was  left  in  his  sea- 
girt prison  to  muse  on  the  past  and  study  men, 
and  understand,  if  he  might,  the  way  God's  worlds 
are  ordered,  he  gropes  on  blind  to  the  end.  He 
tries  to  account  for  his  ruin  by  this  cause  and 
that,  this  combination  of  circumstance  and  that; 
declines  to  see  that  the  Man  of  the  Syrian  wilder- 
ness had  founded  a  kingdom  which  at  last  was 
making  him  and  his  like  impossible  for  ever- 
more ;  that  the  proclamation  that  the  world  is 
God's  and  He  has  given  it  to  His  sons  the  children 
of  men,  is  a  warning  "  hands  off  "  to  all  kingdom 
builders  hereafter  on  the  Devil's  basis. 

His  reputed  nephew  and  successor  failed  to 
learn  the  lesson  of  the  Great  Conqueror's  fall. 
He,  too,  put  his  trust  for  his  fair  kingdom  in  lies 
and  fraud  and  force.  He  held  it  of  the  Devil 
and  made  it  the  Devil's  in  its  political  and  social 

12 


178  KINGDOMS. 

corruption,  in  its  trust  in  shams  and  pretences, 
and  he,  too,  "  the  Sphinx  of  Europe  "  they  called 
him,  the  man  who  seemed  to  hold  the  destinies 
of  Europe  in  his  hands,  disappeared  one  day  like 
an  exploded  bubble,  he  and  his  kingdom  together, 
at  the  firm  touch  of  a  gray-headed  old  man,  who 
believed  in  Almighty  God  and  said  his  prayers! 

For  we  are  in  a  world,  you  know,  where  things 
develop. 

So  the  idea  that  Christ  stood  upon  in  the 
wilderness  that  the  kingdoms  of  the  world  are 
not  the  Devil's  has  been  slowly  developing  with 
the  increasing  years. 

Governments  exist  not  for  the  curse  but  for 
the  good  of  men.  Kings  reign  to  do  Divine 
Service  and  not  Diabolic.  The  Christian  con- 
science has  been  strengthening  and  enlightening 
itself.  Wars  for  one  man's  aggrandizement  have 
ceased  and  even  wars  for  one  people's.  It  is 
only  on  some  pretence  of  beating  back  injustice, 
of  clearing  the  world  of  wrong,  that  any  war  can 
justify  itself  any  more.  Governments  as  their 
sole  title  to  exist  must  be  enlightening  and  ben- 
efiting to  men.  They  do  not  exist  by  the  con- 
sent of  the  governed  solely  by  any  means,  as  our 
Declaration  of  Independence,  with  a  half-glance 
at  the  truth,  declares.     The  people's  unanimous 


KINGDOMS.  179 

consent,  its  enthusiastic  support  under  the  utmost 
Democratic  form,  and  most  minute  registering  of 
the  people's  will,  may  be  a  vile  and  brutal  gov- 
ernment, which  the  rest  of  mankind  may  find  it 
a  bounden  duty  to  destroy.  The  world  to-day 
would  endure  a  Roman  Republic  as  little  as  a 
Roman  Empire. 

And  just  here,  let  me  say,  that  to  us  upon  whom 
the  ends  of  the  world  have  come,  there  rises  the 
most  solemn  responsibility  ever  laid  on  men,  in 
their  corporate  capacity  as  a  nation. 

There  has  been  set  before  our  vision  an  empire 
such  as  never  came  to  the  wildest  dreams  of  am- 
bition, boundless  practically  in  extent,  exhaust- 
less  in  its  resources,  and  in  its  near  future  im- 
mense beyond  any  civilized  land  in  the  numbers 
of  its  people.  So  vast  are  its  power,  riches,  and 
numbers  in  the  field  of  present  vision,  that  we 
may  count  it  safe  from  all  enemies  but  ourselves. 
Our  people  smile  with  contemptuous  indifference 
when  windy  patriots  talk  of  the  need  of  armies 
and  forts  and  iron-clads,  of  our  defenceless  cities 
and  the  long  line  of  a  peaceful  coast,  where  no 
cannon  frown  from  the  headlands,  no  ramparts 
guard  the  shore. 

They  feel,  I  think,  that  they  mean  no  wrong 
and  therefore  no  wrong  will  be  attempted,  that 


i8o  KINGDOMS. 

they  dream  of  no  aggression  upon  others,  and 
others  will  not  make  aggression  upon  them.  But 
also  they  feel  that  a  giant  may  sleep  in  safety; 
that  of  all  empires,  this  last  mighty  birth  of  time 
is  not  called  to  fume  and  boast  and  strut  with 
epaulets  and  feathers  to  scare  a  possible  enemy, 
that  it  at  least,  and  at  last,  can  stand 

"  like  statue  solid  set 
And  moulded  in  colossal  calm." 

Conscious  of  its  own  just  intentions  and  con- 
scious too  of  the  power,  as  all  the  world  is,  of 
sixty-five  million  free  men  in  possession  of  a  con- 
tinent in  the  name  of  God ! 

We  boast  ourselves,  it  is  said,  too  much ;  we  are 
rebuked  for  our  self-consciousness.  It  is  all  a 
question  of  the  temper  of  our  boasting  and  the 
spirit  of  our  self-consciousness  How  do  we 
bear  ourselves  under  the  enormous  responsibility? 
With  all  the  world's  experience  behind  us,  spring- 
ing to  life  full-armed,  beginning  where  other 
peoples  leave  off,  inheritors  of  the  riches  of 
knowledge  and  enlightenment,  with  no  old  wrongs 
to  clear  away,  no  ruins  of  empire  to  cover  out  of 
sight,  in  an  empty  world  it  has  come  to  us  to 
make  a  kingdom. 

The  eyes  of  God  and  man  are  on  us.     If  we 


KINGDOMS.  l8l 

make  a  failure,  it  will  be  the  colossal  failure  of 
all  time. 

We  feel  we  are  not  going  to  fail.  I  am  thank- 
ful we  do.  So  it  be  no  blind  confidence  in  our- 
selves I  am  thankful. 

But  we  cannot  escape  the  temptation.  We  are 
bound  to  be  sifted.  Till  we  are,  we  are  not  sure. 
The  world  is  not  sure.  But  you  say  "  we  have 
been  sifted ;  we  have  gone  through  a  terrible 
experience;  we  have  been  baptized  as  all  peoples 
must  be,  it  seems,  in  blood,  and  have  come  out 
of  that  red  baptism  safe;  our  institutions  are 
secure." 

What  do  you  mean  by  "  our  institutions  "  ?  Is 
there  any  divinity  in  "institutions"  ?  They  are 
only  the  expression  of  a  people's  insight,  its  sense 
of  truth  and  right  and  justice.  And  they  are 
often  far  better  than  the  existing  people.  The 
institutions  are  good  enough.  It  is  a  question, 
after  all,  of  how  the  institutions  are  administered  ! 

The  dead  institution  must  be  converted  into  a 
living  force  before  you  can  decide  very  wisely 
upon  its  character.  The  actual  government  is 
often  very  far  from  the  ideal,  and  the  actual  is 
what  decides  the  character. 

No !  we  have  by  no  means  gone  through  the 
sifting.     There  are  fiercer  trials  than  war.     The 


l82  KINGDOMS. 

temptation  of  a  boundless  prosperity  is  the  sub- 
tlest and  most  seducing. 

It  gives  voice  to  the  ancient  he.  "All  these 
are  mine,  and  to  whomsoever  I  will  I  give  them." 
Increasing  wealth,  ever  swelling  abundance-  the 
trophies  of  a  ^''TrmmpJiant  Democracy,''  in  means 
of  luxury  and  self-indulgence,  are  not  the  securi- 
ties against  a  devil's  kingdom  which  is  doomed, 
by  the  merciful  and  stern  law  of  God  and  nature, 
to  perish. 

It  has  come  to  this  among  us,  and  it  is  a  sign, 
that  the  man  who  desires  a  part  of  the  power  of 
this  great  new  kingdom,  who  takes  the  ordinary 
means  of  getting  control  of  it — the  man,  in  short, 
we  call  politician  or  ofifice-seeker,  for  himself  or 
others  (for  there  are  men  who  would  rather  be 
the  power  behind  the  throne  than  occupy  the 
throne  itself),  is  considered,  over  most  of  our 
country,  as  a  man  who  is  ready  to  sacrifice  prin- 
ciple generally,  and  to  use  crooked  ways  to  ob- 
tain his  ends. 

I  say,  without  a  word  here  of  whether  this  is 
common  or  not,  that  it  is  an  alarming  portent ; 
that  the  name  politician,  which  means  one  who 
busies  himself,  as  every  good  citizen  should,  with 
the  interests  of  his  country,  the  well-being  of  the 
community,  who  even  neglects  his  private  affairs 


KINGDOMS.  183 

to  do  SO,  has  come  to  be  a  name  of  shame.  That 
to  say  of  a  man,  in  a  country  hke  ours,  "  he  is  a 
pohtician  "  should  amount  to  saying  "  he  has  no 
principle,  and  in  public  matters  is  next  door  to  a 
knave,"  is  a  condition  for  very  grave  reflection. 

But  it  has  come  to  that.  There  is  no  denying 
it.  The  statesman  has  died  out.  The  politician 
has  come  in  his  stead.  Has  he  come  to  stay  ? 
Well,  you  may  be  sure  he  will  not  stay  long  nor 
the  kingdom  that  endures  him! 

He  owes  his  existence  here  as  everywhere,  now 
as  at  all  times,  to  the  belief  that  the  kingdoms 
are  the  Devil's.  He  gets  down  upon  his  knees 
to  him  for  a  share  of  his  favor. 

He  does  not  do  it,  usually,  with  the  idea  of 
remaining  there.  There  are  men  who  have  be- 
lieved they  could  give  this  service  and  then,  hav- 
ing gotten  their  grip  upon  the  kingdom,  could 
drive  the  Devil  out.  Indeed,  men  have  more  than 
once  undertaken  that  enterprise  deliberately.  It 
is  a  bright  idea  at  first  sight — the  notion  of  cheat- 
ing the  Devil  into  serving  God.  It  has  been  a 
pet  notion  of  various  kinds  of  men — a  little  evil 
for  a  great  good,  a  lie  to  flavor  the  truth,  a  spirit- 
ual sugar-coated  pill,  lie  outside,  bitter  tonic  truth 
inside,  well-concealed,  and  swallowed  for  the  lie's 
sake ! 


184  KINGDOMS. 

From  the  formal  announcement  that  a  good 
end  justifies  evil  means,  that  a  lie  may  be  told  in 
defence  of  the  truth,  to  a  raffle  at  a  church  fair, 
a  bit  of  gambling  for  the  glory  of  God,  there 
have  been  innumerable  contrivances  to  get  the 
Devil  into  Sunday-school,  and  even  to  set  him 
to  teach  the  catechism,  but  they  have  not  worked 
successfully. 

Your  politician  takes  the  lie  into  silent  partner- 
ship. He  believes  a  plausible  lie  is  better  than 
an  ungainly  truth.  "  The  stupid  people  love  to 
be  deceived,  let  them  be  deceived."  It  is  an  old 
political  maxim. 

So  the  man  begins  to  conceal  unpleasant  truths, 
to  palter  with  his  own  convictions,  to  justify  the 
means  by  the  proposed  end,  to  fawn  upon  men 
whom  at  first  he  must  despise,  to  cringe  and 
crawl  for  popular  favor,  to  mislead  by  plausibil- 
ities, to  bribe  at  last  and  buy  for  money  "  the 
most  sweet  voices  "  of  our  "  free  and  enlightened 
voters  "  from  the  city's  slums  and  grog-shops,  to 
swop  and  trade  with  others  of  his  kind  the  un- 
savory merchandise  of  corrupt  votes  in  which 
they  deal,  to  empty  himself,  in  short,  of  all  that 
goes  to  make  high  character,  honorable  and  in- 
dependent manhood. 

The  temptations  to  this  sort  of  corruption  in 


KINGDOMS,  185 

a  Republic  are  greater  than  they  are  under  any 
form  of  kingdom.  In  the  latter  case  a  man  has 
but  one  or  at  most  a  few  masters  to  lie  to,  flatter, 
fawn  on,  or  deceive.  In  the  former  he  has  thou- 
sands, and  often  the  meanest  and  the  lowest  mas- 
ters. In  a  republic  of  universal  suffrage  ruffians 
often,  and  criminals. 

It  has  so  developed  that  in  our  great  cities 
we  have  such  corruption  and  thievery,  such  mis- 
carriages of  justice,  such  sardonic  mockery  at  any 
pretence  to  truth,  honesty,  or  decency,  as  I  think 
do  not  exist  and  would  not  be  for  a  day  endured 
in  any  other  cities  under  the  sun. 

It  has  come  to  that  pass  that  in  some  cities  to 
occupy  the  position  of  a  city  magistrate  is  almost 
to  proclaim  one's  self  a  knave,  and  to  be  an  alder- 
man is  equivalent  to  confessing  one's  self  a  thief. 
The  influential  politician  is  the  leading  rough  of 
his  ward,  and  the  interests  of  a  great  city  are  dis- 
cussed and  settled  in  its  grog-shops!  Is  it  any 
wonder  that,  directly  in  the  face  of  our  professed 
political  principles,  the  rock-based  foundations, 
as  we  imagined,  of  our  free  institutions,  great 
cities  have  asked  that  their  franchises  be  re- 
stricted, their  home  rule  abolished,  and  that  some 
decent  men  from  beyond  their  own  debased  sur- 


l86  KINGDOMS. 

roundings  would  order  their  affairs  with  some 
regard  to  decency  ? 

Does  the  plague  of  the  lie  stop  with  the  great 
city  ?     We  should  be  thankful  if  it  did. 

But  one  cannot  blind  himself  to  the  situation 
to  that  extent.  That  American  politics  are  now 
and  have  been  for  long  thoroughly  corrupt  is  an 
open  secret. 

Not  long  since,  one  of  our  leading  statesmen, 
speaking  to  me  of  a  step  which  he  felt  constrained 
to  take  by  his  conscientious  sense  of  duty,  said, 
"  the  politicians  say  I  have  ruined  myself,  politi- 
cally, by  that  act.  Why,  sir,  they  talk,  some  of 
them,  as  if  they  carried  the  suffrages  of  the  peo- 
ple in  their  vest  pockets.  One  of  them  had  pro- 
posed, he  said,  to  transfer  me  five  thousand  votes, 
but  after  my  action  he  feared  he  could  not  deliver 
them.  If  I  thought  as  meanly  of  the  American 
people  as  he  and  his  kind  I  should  esteem  it  a 
personal  disgrace  to  accept  any  office  at  their 
hands." 

The  corruption  of  our  politics  is  having  its  re- 
action upon  the  corruptors.  The  American  poli- 
tician is  one  of  the  most  remarkable  as  well  as 
the  most  sinister  developments  of  all  time. 

To  have  votes  enough  is  to  be  on  the  heights 
of  earthly  felicity.     He  has  made  the  word  "  pop- 


KINGDOMS.  187 

ular  "  the  measure  of  all  excellence.  A  man  is 
"popular,"  he  is  therefore  a  blessed  man.  A 
preacher  is  "popular,"  he  must  be  therefore  the 
best  and  most  admirable  preacher.  A  patent  pill 
is  "popular,"  it  is  incumbent  on  us  all  to  swallow 
the  pill.  A  measure  is  popular,  there  is  no  further 
question  of  its  justice  or  wisdom.  "Popular" 
expresses  the  final  measure  of  all  earthly  perfec- 
tion in  pills,  preachers,  or  politics! 

And  yet  the  man  has  an  inner  contempt  for  the 
poor  rag  god  he  is  down  on  his  knees  before. 
He  beats  him  and  abuses  him  as  a  Congo  negro 
his  mumbo  jumbo.  He  buys  him  in  the  market. 
He  buys  him  with  money,  or  with  his  own  abject 
and  unmanly  service.  He  is  his  slave.  He  dares 
have  no  will  of  his  own,  and  express  no  opinion 
of  his  own.  And  yet  he  despises  the  pitiful  mas- 
ter he  adores. 

The  moral  decadence  that,  in  so  many  cases, 
follows  office-seeking  and  office  holding,  is  one  of 
the  most  striking  phenomena  of  our  modern  life. 
The  man  seems  to  become  worm-eaten  all 
through,  while  he  still  retains  the  outside  fair- 
ness, like  timbers  I  have  seen  in  the  waters  of 
our  Southern  coast,  riddled  and  channelled 
through  and  through  by  the  teredo,  while  the 
outside  gave  no  sign. 


1 88  KINGDOMS. 

Nay,  universal  suffrage,  we  are  seeing,  gives 
only  a  possibility  of  a  larger  corruption.  It 
makes  temptation  universal.  To  befool  the  igno- 
rant, to  buy  the  venal,  to  flatter  the  corrupt,  to 
oppress  those  who  are  without  political  influence, 
and  fawn  on  those  who  have,  becomes  politics. 
The  statesman  perishes.  The  demagogue  comes 
to  power.  Government  becomes  a  game  of  trick- 
ery, and  an  election  an  organized  fraud. 

It  was  not  meant  for  this.  The  men  who  or- 
ganized this  new  kingdom  in  the  West  meant  it 
to  be  a  divine  arrangement.  They  looked  for 
and  asked  God's  blessing  upon  it.  They  believed 
people  would  be  intelligent  and  conscientious, 
and  statesmen  would  be  true,  the  leaders  and 
teachers  of  the  people.  They  based  their  experi- 
ment, for  it  was  an  experiment,  upon  faith  in  God 
and  man.  They  looked  in  hope  to  see  the  es- 
tablishment of  such  a  kingdom  of  purity,  sim- 
plicity, and  integrity  as  h.ad  never  yet  existed 
upon  the  earth.  No  prophet  could  have  per- 
suaded them  that  men  could  ever  buy  seats  in 
the  grave  Senate  they  established,  or  ruffians 
sit  in  the  councils  of  American  cities,  or  the 
votes  of  those  citizens  be  bought  and  sold  like 
old  clothes  in  a  rag  fair,  *'  in  blocks  of  five  "  or 
otherwise! 


KINGDOMS.  189 

Where  is  our  trust  for  deliverance  from  these 
tendencies  which  all  good  men  deplore  ?  In  uni- 
versal education  ?  Yes,  if  by  that  you  mean  edu- 
cation of  the  whole  man,  spirit  as  well  as  mind, 
ethical  as  well  as  intellectual.  But  if  you  mean, 
what  is  commonly  called  education,  the  teaching 
of  a  man  how  to  take  care  of  himself,  the  sharp- 
ening of  the  intelligence  only,  then  I  beg  to  say 
that  such  a  trust  is  a  rotten  reed,  in  face  of  the 
fact  that  our  penitentiaries  are  filled  with  gradu- 
ates of  our  common  schools,  of  our  academies, 
even  of  our  colleges,  and  that  whole  classes  of 
crimes,  which  are  the  most  demoralizing  to  so- 
ciety and  the  most  threatening  to  the  safety  of 
the  Republic,  can  only  be  committed  by  your  so- 
called  educated  men. 

In  our  increased  scientific  knowledge  do  you 
say?  In  our  larger  mastery  over  the  material 
things  about  us,  in  our  increased  deliverance 
from  superstition,  and  even,  as  some  say,  from 
religion  ? 

Will  the  science  deliver  you,  I  ask,  which,  in  its 
final  philosophical  statement,  assures  you  that 
you  are  a  product  of  the  earth  you  walk  on,  and 
responsible  only  to  it  and  its  opinions,  and  un- 
der no  restraint  save  the  laws  it  has  evolved  ? 
That  there  is,  in  the  whole  universe,  no  absolute 


IQO  KINGDOMS. 

right  or  wrong,  only  passing  opinions  about  things 
of  the  day  ?  That  consequently,  if  public  opinion 
allows  bribery  bribery  is  all  right,  and  if  the  de- 
velopment has  only  reached  the  point  of  political 
knavery  as  yet,  you  are  quite  justified  in  being  a 
public  knave  ?  Trust  or  hope  in  a  philosophy 
which  sweeps  away  all  basis  of  moral  action  in 
private  or  in  public,  and  effaces  God  out  of  the 
universe,  for  the  deliverance  of  a  people  from 
national  corruption! 

There  has  been  a  direct  reversal  of  the  condi- 
tions here.  The  development  has  been  the  wrong 
way.  The  Republic  was  purer  fifty  years  ago. 
In  Washington's  day  public  service  was  not  the 
spoil  of  a  purchased  party  victory. 

Have  we  hope  in  our  free  and  enlightened 
Press,  "the  Palladium  of  our  liberties"?  The 
suggestion  could  only  waken  Titanic  laughter  on 
Earth,  and  make  the  angels  weep.  You  have 
only  to  look  at  it  and  be  answered.  It  has  no 
conception  of  leadership  or  teaching  or  enlight- 
ening now.  If  it  ever  had  it  has  long  since  ab- 
dicated such  pretension.  It  is  down  in  the  mud 
before  the  rag  god  "  popularity,"  and  is  itself  the 
most  venal  thing  where  all  things  are  venal.  It 
prizes  truth  if  it  will  sell  the  paper.  It  prizes  a 
lie  equally  if  it  will  do  the  same. 


KINGDOMS. 


191 


We  cannot  find  much  hope  in  our  "free  Press," 
Where  then  ?     The  old    hope,   I  think,  is   the 
only  sure  one — the  fathers'  hope. 

"  In  God  and  godlike  men  we  put  our  trust." 

I  have  not  said  all  this  because  I  believe  the 
wondrous  Empire  of  the  West  is  ruined  or  near 
ruined.     I  have  spoken  in  warning,  not  in  panic. 

I  believe  we  must  hark  back  here  to  the  old 
foundations.  A  development  to  destruction  is  a 
possible  development,  but  not  a  pleasant  one, 
certainly  a  development,  which  should  be  by  any 
means  stopped. 

The  Republic  is  a  Kingdom  of  God.  It  is 
under  no  bestial  or  diabolic  law.  We  have  the 
right  to  its  possession  and  enjoyment.  The 
world  waited  for  it  long,  and  it  came  with  the 
sun-burst  of  a  divine  splendor.  Heroes  rocked 
its  cradle.  The  fathers  thanked  God  for  it,  and 
prayed  Him  to  save  it  forever.  We  have  been 
turning  it  into  a  kingdom  of  the  Devil.  We  have 
been  treating  it  and  seeking  our  glory  in  it  as  a 
vulgar  growth  out  of  the  dirt.  It  has  lost  its 
divine  meaning  to  many  of  us.  They  take  it  for 
an  organization  out  of  which  to  get  the  utmost 
possible  for  their  greed,  their  pride,  or  their 
lusts,  a  partnership  in  a  free  fight  for  the  world's 


192  KINGDOMS. 

offal,  and  woe  to  him  who  does  not  get  offal  suf- 
ficient. 

There  is  virtue  enough  in  the  land  to  ban  and 
banish  such  bestial  conception  of  national  life. 
Let  the  coming  men  enter  upon  it  as  a  divine 
charge.  Let  them  leap  the  thirty  years  of  rapid 
decadence,  and  stand  upon  the  old  ideal,  where 
millionaires  existed  not  and  "  boodlers  "  were  un- 
known. 

The  Kingdom  is  God's !  Rich,  grand,  and  fair, 
the  stately  mother-land  is  divine!  She  is  worth 
all  our  love  and  reverence.  She  is  nurse,  and 
teacher,  and  guide.  Her  true  voice  is  always 
clear  for  high  things,  true  things,  pure  things. 
Her  offices  are  sacred  trusts.  Her  character, 
her  great  name  and  fame  are  in  the  charge  of 
her  children. 

Shall  we  stand  and  see  her  debased  and  dis- 
honored, her  queenly  robes  besmirched,  her  im- 
perial diadem  trampled  in  the  dust,  her  honors 
put  to  sale  in  the  market  place  ? 

If  she  be  a  Devil's  kingdom,  there  is  no  word 
to  be  said.  If  we  seek  to  live  in  the  republic  as 
in  a  nest  of  unclean  beasts,  because  it  is  the  best 
and  richest  feeding  place  and  shelter  for  such 
beasts  yet  won  by  men  on  earth  then  I  need  say 
no  word  more. 


KINGDOMS. 


193 


But  if  all  this  is  the  old  diabolic  lie  of  the 
wilderness,  if  the  Republic  be  a  Kingdom  of 
God,  given  in  these  last  days  to  men,  as  the 
fathers  believed  and  as  they  believed  who  left 
their  bloody  relics  in  many  an  unknown  grave 
giving  their  young  lives  to  save  her,  then  to  keep 
her  saved  for  evermore,  is  to  train  her  sons  to  live 
in  her  as  "  Sons  of  God,"  as  men  who  can  starve 
but  cannot  betray  a  trust,  men  who  can  suffer 
but  never  fail,  men  who  can  die  but  cannot  lie, 
men  who  hold  every  fraud,  every  piece  of  trick- 
ery, every  bribe  given  or  received,  to  be  high 
treason  against  the  Republic. 

Her  sons,  knowing  her  great  meaning,  reverenc- 
ing her  as  a  gift  from  God,  living  in  her  as  in  a 
kingdom  of  God,  whose  law  is  truth,  justice,  and 
righteousness,  answering  the  old  temptation  with 
the  old  word  of  power  "  Thou  shalt  worship  the 
Lord  Thy  God  and  Him  only  shalt  thou  serve — 
so  and  only  so — 

"  Shall  she  lift  herself  to  sunlight 

And  the  fair  daylight  of  time  and  man 
With  the  same  splendor  in  her  eyes  forever." 

13 


LECTURE  VI. 
THE  LAW  OF  THE  CASE. 


^'1/  ikoti  be  the  Son  of  God  cast  thyself  down;  for  it  is  written, 
'He  shall  give  his  angels  charge  concerning  thee,  and  in  their 
hands  they  shall  bear  thee  up,  lest  at  any  time  thou  dash  thy  foot 
asrainst  a  stone,' "  St.  Matt.  iv.  6. 


LECTURE  VI. 
THE  LAW  OF  THE  CASE. 

THE  relation  between  science  and  religion  is, 
among  thinking  men,  the  most  vital,  intel- 
lectual interest  of  our  time.  What  our  discover- 
ies in  what  we  call  "the  laws  of  nature,"  that  is, 
the  orderly  sequence  of  phenomena,  bear  to  our 
faith  in  power,  and  orderly  sequences,  which  are 
not  phenomena  whether  in  ourselves  or  in  another 
Being  or  beings  higher  than  ourselves,  what  the 
connection,  if  any,  between  processes  which  we 
can  see  and  test  and  tabulate,  and  processes 
which  we  cannot  test  and  cannot  tabulate,  is  just 
now  the  question  which  is  pressing  upon  Theo- 
logians and  Naturalists  both. 

That,  in  a  logical  analysis,  there  is  no  necessity 
for  the  sequences  we  call  "  laws  of  nature  "  goes 
without  saying.  It  is  a  part  of  our  intellectual 
nature  to  ask  the  cause  of  things.  There  is  a 
compulsion  upon  us  to  find  the  thing  that  does 
this   other   thing.     But   when    we    examine    the 


198  THE  LAW  OF   THE    CASE.      " 

foundations  of  our  conclusions  upon  a  given 
cause  and  effect,  the  generalization,  that  is,  of 
these  observations  which  we  call  a  "  law,"  we 
find  the  sole  basis  of  our  law  to  be  a  sequence, 
"  one  thing  follows  another,  as  far  as  we  have 
observed,  therefore  they  will  always  come  in  that 
relation,  and  therefore  the  one  is  cause  and  the 
other  is  effect." 

It  IS  post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc  ^nd  nothing  more. 
Why  these  sequences  occur,  is  entirely  beyond 
us.  And  how  many  links  we  should  be  obliged 
to  go  back  in  the  chain  before  we  find  the  real 
cause  no  man  can  tell.  We  know  that  a  certain 
degree  of  what  we  call  cold,  quite  distinctly 
measurable,  freezes  water.  Biit  what  the  cold 
is,  and  what  causes  it,  lie  outside  our  knowledge. 

In  short  we  see  the  visible  process,  two  or  three 
links  in  the  sequences  of  what  we  call  cause  and 
effect,  but  no  man  of  sense  supposes  these  to  be 
all  the  sequences.  There  comes  one  at  last  as 
he  goes  up  the  chain,  which  goes  out  into  the 
invisible,  an  effect  without  any  visible  cause. 

Now    there    are   several    conclusions    open    to 
choose  in   this  condition   of  things   and  each  of 
them     may   justify    itself    upon    some    rational  ' 
ground.     But  there  is  one  which  is  absolutely 
irrational,  the  conclusion,  namely,  that  the  chain 


THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  199 

of  sequences,  or  what  we  call  cause  and  effect, 
ceases  with  the  last  link  we  can  see. 

All  our  experience  (and  experience  is  all  we 
have  to  go  upon)  compels  us  to  hold  that  there 
may  be  many  links  yet  in  the  chain ;  that  some  of 
them  may  yet  be  discovered ;  that  we  are  com- 
pelled by  an  intellectual  necessity  to  try  to  dis- 
cover them,  but  that,  no  matter  how  many  we 
succeed  in  making  visible  and  knowable,  we  shall 
still  find  the  last  of  them  linked  back  into  the 
unknown. 

And  there  is  still  another  conclusion  which 
only  needs  to  be  stated  to  be  clearly  seen  and 
admitted,  and  the  forgetting  of  which  puts  a  de- 
lusion upon  us  continually,  this,  namely,  that  the 
order  of  the  sequences  is  surely  not  their  cause; 
that  is,  that  the  generalization  which  we  call  a 
Law  of  Nature  is  a  formula  of  the  mind  and  not 
a  force,  nor  itself  a  cause  of  anything. 

All  we  know,  then,  is  sequences — this  thing 
comes,  that  other  thing  follows  it.  Of  the  causes 
of  things  we  are  absolutely  ignorant. 

Causes,  therefore,  are  not  phenomena.  They 
lie  outside  the  realm  of  observation.  Phenom- 
ena cannot  be  the  effective  cause  of  phenomena. 
The  phenomenal  world,  therefore,  is  not  its  own 
cause.     What  makes  it  and  all  the  phenomena  in 


200  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 

it,  lies  outside  it,  and  is  in  a  sense  unknowable, 
that  is,  in  any  scientific  sense,  for  science  does 
not  deal  with  ultimates,  but  Avith  phenomena 
only. 

At  the  same  time  that  the  sequences  which  we 
cannot  see  are  not  capricious,  that  they  are 
orderly  and  harmonious,  and  to  be  trusted,  is  a 
necessity  also  of  our  thinking.  That  cause  of 
phenomena  which  resolves  itself  into  the  invisi- 
ble force  of  a  human  will,  capricious  and  strange 
as  it  may  at  times  appear,  we  yet  decline  to  be- 
lieve capricious  or  purposeless.  We  are  com- 
pelled to  seek  a  motive,  the  invisible,  intellectual 
force  w^hich  swayed  the  will.  And  then  only  do 
we  reach  the  point  where  cause  and  effect  clasp 
each  other  where  the  cause  originates  itself.  We 
have  reached  the  home  of  causes —  personality. 

For  it  will  not  be  claimed  by  any  thinker, 
that  the  motives  which  sway  even  the  Jiiiman 
will  are  always  or  necessarily  from  without. 
Even  if  we  admit,  as  I  am  quite  ready  to  do, 
that  my  will  acts  from  motive  in  each  particular 
case,  I  am  very  certain  that,  in  many  cases,  that 
motive  is  entirely  from  within.  I  should  simply 
declare  it  to  me  quite  "  unthinkable  " ;  that  I  am 
not  able  to  decide  my  action  and  do  not  habitu- 
ally decide  it  by  motives  Avhich  belong  solely  to 


THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  201 

my  own  personality  and  originate  within  and  not 
without  it. 

The  naturaHsts  have  been  compelled  to  an- 
nounce a  "  Power  behind  Phenomena,"  though 
they  declare  such  power  "  unknowable/'  and  I 
freely  admit  that,  in  the  sense  of  the  naturalist,  it 
is  unknowable. 

But  out  of  our  own  consciousness  we  are  forced 
to  this  conclusion,  that  whatever  the  final  source 
of  Power  be,  whatever  the  final  original  of  all 
causes,  it  must  be  a  Personality,  since  it  is  utterly 
unthinkable  that  anything  save  a  Person  can 
originate  within  itself  a  motive  and  of  itself  be- 
come a  cause. 

It  is  equally  a  necessity  of  our  thinking,  de- 
rived from  all  our  experience,  upon  which  we 
rest,  as  it  were  instinctively,  that  in  that  Person- 
ality we  should  find  cause  and  effect  still,  that  is, 
every  determination  of  that  Personal  will  would 
be  orderly  and  reasonable  and  the  result  of  some 
sufificient  motive  if  we  only  knew  it,  though  such 
motive  would  originate  in  the  Personality  itself. 

The  final  Personality,  then,  to  which  it  seems 
we  are  driven  to  hold  "the  Power  behind  phen- 
omena" to  be,  must  be  intelligent,  orderly,  and  in 
itself  be  its  own  Law  and  its  own  Order,  the  orig- 
inator of  its  own  motives,  and  the  harmonious 
source  and  last  cause  of  all  causes. 


202  THE   LAW  OF    THE    CASE. 

A  first  expectation  then  would  be  that  the  re- 
lation between  "  Science,"  even  in  the  narrow 
sense,  and  indeed  somewhat  foolish  sense,  in 
which  the  word  is  now  used,  to  express  only  what 
we  know  of  phenomena,  and,  what  we  call  "  re- 
ligion," that  is,  some  belief  in  realities  behind 
phenomena,  ourselves  to  begin  with,  in  that 
which  makes  us  Is,  and  in  another  Being  or  Be- 
ings beside,  who  are  related  to  us  in  some  way — 
the  first  expectation  I  say  would  be  that  these 
two  would  harmonize;  that  when  there  appears 
to  be  discord,  it  is  only  in  our  own  lack  of 
knowledge,  or  dulness  of  vision,  not  in  the  situa- 
tion itself. 

•What  I  want  to  call  your  attention  to  now  is, 
that  this  problem  of  the  relation  of  "  science  "  and 
religion,  like  every  problem  I  think,  which  con- 
cerns men  in  belief  or  conduct,  comes  into  the 
Temptation  of  the  Wilderness,  and  finds  a  sug- 
gested solution. 

Mark  that  the  temptation  to  humanity  is  to 
seek  to  make  its  living  upon  the  Earth,  to  get  its 
bread  in  the  wilderness  into  which  it  has  been 
led  up,  at  the  suggestion  of  the  Devil. 

It  has  defended  itself  against  the  temptation 
which  comes  through  its  physical  needs  by  the 
assertion  of  its  double  nature  and  double  life — 


THE  LAW  OF   THE    CASE. 


203 


its  existence  outside  phenomena,  its  relations  to 
the  invisible — '^  Man  doth  not  live  by  bread 
only." 

And  again,  on  the  side  of  its  intelligence,  its 
desire  for  kingdoms,  for  ordering  things  and  har- 
monizing, for  putting  wild  forces  under  will  con- 
trol, for  making  a  Kosmos  out  of  a  Chaos,  it  is 
tempted  by  being  urged  to  admit  the  sovereignty 
of  Evil,  its  supremacy  in  all  kingdoms  possible 
upon  the  Earth.  Out  of  this  it  emerged  victori- 
ously by  assertion  of  the  sovereignty  of  God  and 
good.  "  The  Power  behind  phenomena  is  holy, 
just,  and  true;  there  are  many  cheats  put  upon 
us  by  the  visible.  It  may  at  times  seem  as  if  the 
powers  behind  and  within  all  kingdoms  are  dia- 
bolic, but  I  decline  to  believe  it.  I  will  not  ac- 
cept a  Kingdom  as  a  fief  of  Evil.  Under  any 
circumstances,  and  all  circumstances,  I  will  wor- 
ship the  Lord,  Holy  and  Good,  and  Him  only 
shall  I  serve." 

Humanity  is  delivered,  that  is,  from  submission 
to  temporary  wrong,  from  the  misleading  of 
triumphant  evil  visible,  by  its  grasp  upon  the  in- 
visible, the  Holiness  and  Goodness  which,  amid 
all  phenomenal  delusions,  it  yet  holds  to  be  Mas- 
ter and  Lord,  and  entitled  only  to  its  homage 
and  service. 


204 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   CASE. 


The  appeal  again  is  to  the  things  not  seen — the 
eternal  processes,  the  eternal  causes. 

Then  comes  the  final  issue.  "  Since  this  is  so 
and  you  are  yourself  of  the  real  world,  and  so 
firm  fixed  as  servant  and  subject  of  the  Lord  of 
that,  and,  as  you  claim,  of  all  worlds,  have  the 
courage  of  your  convictions.  Your  phenomenal 
life  is  nothing  anyway  by  your  own  argument. 
Besides  God  has  promised  to  take  care  even  of 
that.  You  have  appealed  to  Him  against  what 
your  eyes  see,  to  the  Power  behind  phenomena 
against  phenomena  themselves.  Stand  by  the 
appeal.  Cast  thyself  down.  Trust  Him  to  the 
uttermost.  He  has  given  His  word.  His  angels 
shall  take  care  that  thou  do  not  strike  even  thy 
foot  against  a  stone.  The  phenomenal  according 
to  you  is  only  phenomenal,  and  a  passing  shadow 
to  the  Son  of  God;  its  poor  hungers, whether  for 
bread  or  kingdoms,  are  but  for  a  day.  The  short 
phantasmal  animal  life  is  nothing  in  any  case. 
Trust  thyself  to  the  real  life  and  power  of  which 
thou  art  a  part.     Cast  thyself  doivn  !  " 

The  scene  of  the  trial  is  well  chosen.  It  is  no 
longer  in  the  wilderness  of  physical  want  and 
bodily  distress.  It  is  no  longer  on  the  mountain 
where  the  world's  glories  and  glooms  appeal  to 
the    intellect    and   imagination.      The   issue   has 


THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  205 

been  gathering  nearer  to  the  central  citadel  of 
human  nature,  to  the  very  spiritual  centre  and 
heart  of  the  whole. 

Foiled  at  the  gate  of  the  senses,  repelled  at  the 
gate  of  the  intelligence,  the  assault  is  now  upon 
the  very  invisible  personality  itself — the  Spirit. 

The  field  of  the  struggle  is  the  summit  of  God's 
House,  the  very  highest  pinnacle  on  the  mount 
of  snow  and  gold  where  God's  pure  dwelling  is. 
The  Holy  of  Holies  is  beneath,  the  Altar  of  Sac- 
rifice and  of  incense.  The  odors  of  the  offerings 
and  the  voices  of  priests  and  people,  in  prayer  and 
chant,  rise  in  the  still  air.  God's  special  presence 
is  here.  It  is  the  home  and  abiding  place  of  the 
Eternal  upon  earth. 

Here,  if  anywhere,  the  Son  of  God  may  trust 
himself  to  the  things  which  are  eternal  and  put 
himself  in  the  hands  of  His  Y dither —Cast  thyself 
down  ! 

It  is  clearly  a  question  of  the  relationship  be- 
tween the  visible  and  invisible  processes.  The 
Son  of  God,  mind,  is  not  asked  to  commit  suicide. 
That  is  not  the  temptation.  He  is  promised  that 
the  fall  shall  not  result  in  death.  The  angels 
shall  bear  Him  up.  The  invisible  forces  shall 
preserve  Him  against  the  visible.  Even  physical 
destruction    is   not    suggested.      There  shall   be 


2o6  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 

physical  preservation.  Even  the  foot  shall  not 
be  injured  when  He  flashes  from  the  golden  pin- 
nacle to  the  rocks  below. 

What  is  the  temptation?  I  answer  a  common 
abiding  temptation  of  course.  We  may  expect 
that ;  one  that  remains  among  men,  and  among 
men  also  in  their  best  estate  and  highest  attain- 
ment— the  temptation  to  despise  the  world  they 
live  in,  the  old  temptation  of  the  two  other  trials 
in  fact,  namely,  to  believe  the  world  visible  to  be 
partly  or  wholly  the  Devil's,  and  that  its  laws  and 
limitations  may  be  trampled  on  and  broken  down 
by  men  who  dwell  upon  the  heights  of  God's 
Temple  in  the  clear  air  of  religion  and  on  the 
lofty  pinnacles  of  faith,  and  breathe  continually 
the  incense  of  prayer  and  offering. 

It  was  the  temptation  which,  yielded  to,  drove 
men  into  the  wilderness  in  other  days  to  herd 
with  the  wild  beasts  and,  in  a  fancied  imitation  of 
Christ,  to  despise  the  world  Christ  loved  and 
died  to  redeem. 

Men  took  refuge  in  the  cloister  later,  fleeing 
from  a  world  they  frankly  declared  to  be  the 
Devil's,  casting  contempt  upon  it  and  all  its  ways, 
its  governments,  its  business,  its  families,  its 
homes,  its  motherhood  and  fatherhood,  as  being 
by  their   nature  accursed  of  God — nothing  left 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   CASE.  207 

then  for  the  sons  of  God,  or  they  who  would  be 
such,  but  to  bar  out  and  wall  out  every  approach 
of  what  was  only  fit  to  be  trampled  and  spat 
upon. 

It  was  this  which  set  St.  Simeon  of  the  pillar, 
and  other  madmen  like  him,  in  Christ's  name,  to 
abandon  every  human  duty,  household,  commun- 
ity and  church  duty,  to  break  every  law  of  our 
Lord's,  one  might  say,  and  outrage  every  moral 
obligation  of  man  to  the  world  and  his  fellow- 
men,  in  the  name  of  Christ. 

"  But  such  temptations  are  not  experienced 
now  ?"  Are  they  not.?  The  old  Manichee  libel 
upon  the  world  is  not  dead  by  any  means.  It 
has  survived  through  many  changes,  and  takes 
on  many  forms.  The  notion  of  a  contest  between 
the  "  processes "  of  the  natural  world  and  the 
powers  of  the  world  invisible,  you  will  find,  I 
imagine,  very  common  yet,  among  very  religious 
people.  The  notion  is  at  the  root  of  a  great  deal 
of  what  passes  for  piety,  and  finds  expression  in 
hymn  and  prayer.  It  is  by  no  means  unheard  of 
that  a  man  should  cast  his  body  down,  so  only 
that  he  save  his  soul,  that  his  body  is  a  mere 
clog  to  him,  and  he  cannot  do  better  than  get  rid 
of  it.  Is  it  quite  understood  and  accepted  that 
a  man  is  put  in  trust  of  his  body  as  of  his  spirit, 


2o8  THE  LAW  OF   THE    CASE. 

and  that  in  many  cases  it  is  just  as  much  a  sin  to 
be  sick  as  it  is  a  sin  to  steal  ? 

The  old  doctrine  of  "special  Providences,"  so 
called,  as  commonly  accepted  by  pious  people, 
was,  for  its  rationale,  founded  almost  on  the 
Tempter's  words — God  would  protect  us  even 
against  our  own  stupidity  or  our  own  presump- 
tion, and  even  our  own  sin.  We  might  cast  our- 
selves down  from  any  height  but  His  angels  were 
always  on  the  watch  for  us,  if  we  were  only  of  "  the 
Elect."  The  Almighty  had  no  regard  for  His 
own  order  and  arrangement  upon  earth.  Indeed 
it  was  not  quite  certain  He  had  any  fixed  order 
at  all  upon  it !  At  all  events,  He  would  disar- 
range it  and  break  it  all  up  upon  a  call  made  in 
favor  of  His  special  favorites. 

I  deny  not,  understand,  that  many  beautiful 
and  faithful  Christian  lives  were  lived  under  this 
view  of  things,  for  God's  grace  goes  over  all,  and 
"  right  views "  of  that  grace  are  not  at  all  as 
necessary,  as  a  certain  class  of  people  used  to  try 
to  impress  upon  us,  in  order  to  right  living. 

That  it  led  in  other  cases  to  evil,  to  a  caricature 
of  Christianity,  to  a  spiritual  pride  and  self-con- 
ceit, offensive  and  intolerable  to  Christian  hu- 
mility, I  am  very  certain. 

It  produced  prayers  framed  on  the  very  model 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   CASE. 


209 


of  the  Pharisee's,  and  by  no  means  extinct  yet, 
in  which  men  warmed  up  their  gratitude  to  God 
by  reminding  Him  and  themselves  of  how  much 
He  had  done  for  them  as  compared  with  other 
men ;  of  how  He  had  burned  other  men's  houses 
and  spared  theirs ;  how  He  had  sunk  other 
men's  ships  and  brought  theirs  safe  to  land ; 
how  other  men's  children  had  died,  and  how 
theirs  were  healthy  and  strong  ;  how  other  people 
were  led  into  temptation  even,  and  deprived  of 
the  means  of  grace,  while  they  had  been  carefully 
guarded,  and  surrounded  with  all  means  to  de- 
fend and  save  their  souls. 

It  seemed  impossible  to  get  up  any  gratitude 
to  the  Almighty  except  on  the  ground  of  con- 
trasting His  forgetfulness  at  least  of  other  people, 
with  His  special  consideration  for  them,  and  the 
highest  gratitude  seemed  possible  only  when  His 
forgetfulness  of  others  gave  way  to  a  sharp  re- 
membrance of  them  for  punishment,  to  be  con- 
trasted, in  calm  satisfaction,  with  the,  of  course, 
"  undeserved "  blessings  He  was  pouring  upon 
them  —  "  No  better  by  nature  than  others  "  always 
to  be  added ! '- 

*  I  take  the  following  from  the  last  number  of  a  little  Sunday- 
school  paper. 

The  writer  has  told  a  little  story,  real  or  imaginary,  and  pro- 
14 


2IO  THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE. 

What  strange  manifestation  of  character  came 
out  under  this  view  of  things  among  people  who 
considered  themselves  good  Christians! 

Pardon  me  a  reminiscence  of  my  own  ministry. 
In  the  family  of  one  of  my  parishioners  was  an 
only  child,  a  little  girl  of  marvellous  precocity  of 
intelligence  and  of  an  exquisite  beauty.  The 
child  became  greatly  attached  to  me  as  I  met  her 
in  my  pastoral  visits  or  in  the  Sunday-school. 
She  was,  of  course,  the  apple  of  the  parents'  eyes. 
The  mother,  especially,  made  an  idol  of  the  little 
creature,  and  indulged  to  the  full  her  motherly 
pride  in  the  child's  wonderful  beauty  and  bright- 
ness. 

A  somewhat  foolish  mother,  she  dressed  the 
little  one  as  foolish  mothers  will,  not  for  the 
child's  health  or  comfort,  but  to  adorn  her  fair- 
ness. So  it  came  once  that,  returning  from  an 
absence,  I  was  sent  for  to  see  her  and  found  the 
child  in  a  hopeless  case,  in  the  high  fever  of  an 
attack  of  pneumonia.  She  knew  me  in  her  semi- 
delirious  state  and  I  prayed  for  her,  and  she  said 

ceeds  to  say  that  "  the  little  story  teaches  us  these  precious 
lessons."     Here  are  two  : 

First,  that  many  others  are  far  worse  off  than  ourselves;  and 
that  for  this  reason,  if  for  no  other,  we  should  be  grateful. 

Secondly,  that  in  trying  to  please  others  we  forget  our  own 
troubles.     . 


FHE   LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  211 

her  own  small  prayer,  her  hand  in  mine,  and  then 
came  the  end  and  the  little  hands  were  folded, 
and  the  bright  eyes  closed  forever.  Another 
sinless  soul  was  gathered  with  the  Holy  Inno- 
cents about  the  Throne  of  God. 

Something  very  precious  had  gone  out  of  my 
own  life  when  my  small  parishioner  was  taken 
and  my  heart  was  heavy.  The  parents  were 
heart-broken.  The  mother's  grief  was  wild  and 
uncontrolled. 

I  went  to  see  her  after  the  funeral;  I  had 
learned  all  the  facts  by  this.  There  had  been  a 
juvenile  party.  It  was  winter  weather,  bitter 
cold,  and  snow  upon  the  ground.  The  little 
creature  must  go,  of  course.  The  gathering 
would  be  incomplete  without  her.  So  the  vain 
mother  dresses  the  child  upon  that  winter  even- 
ing with  her  arms  and  little  neck  bare,  her  limbs 
lightly  clad,  in  fashion,  to  show  the  grace  of  the 
child's  beauty — how  many  foolish  mothers  have 
done  and  will  do  just  the  same! — and  sends  her 
out  to  the  merriment  of  the  small  people's  party. 

Pneumonia  came,  of  course! 

When  I  visited  my  poor  parishioner  in  incon- 
trollable  distress  for  her  loss;  when  she  cried  out 
against  God  for  taking  her  treasure  from  her 
arms,  accusing  His  justice  and  Mercy;  when  she 


212  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE, 

asked  me  to  pray  that  she  might  see  some  reason 
and  some  right  in  her  desolation,  I  could  not  re- 
strain myself;  I  spoke  some  certain  plain  words 
which,  if  hard,  were  true  and  wholesome,  for  my 
own  grief  was  great. 

I  said,  "  Do  not  blame  God,  please,  for  the 
child's  death.  Do  you  suppose  He  would  sus- 
pend the  laws  of  the  universe  for  your  sake? 
What  right  or  claim  have  you  upon  Him  for  such 
favor  at  His  hands  ?  He  did  not  kill  the  child 
as  you  accuse  Him.  You  killed  her  yourself. 
Your  own  foolish  vanity  made  you  break  His 
laws,  His  earthly  laws,  indeed,  but  still  His  laws, 
expressive  of  His  will.  The  result  came.  The 
child  was  sure  to  take  pneumonia.  You  deliber- 
ately risked  her  life.  Did  you  expect  a  miracle  ? 
And  sending  her  out  dressed  as  you  did,  only  a 
miracle  could  have  saved  her  from  pneumonia. 
Do  not  blame  God.     Blame  yourself." 

My  poor  parishioner  is  type  of  a  large  class. 

They  blame  the  Almighty  for  the  natural  and 
inevitable  results  of  their  own  folly  and  their  own 
sin,  and  then  think  themselves  exercising  the 
highest  piety  when  they  seek  to  reconcile  them- 
selves and  submit  to  God's  will.  To  tell  them 
what  is  the  plain  truth,  that  the  result  was  not 
according  to  God's  will  but  against  that  will,  the 


THE  LAW  OF   THE    CASE.  213 

consequence  of  breaking  His  wise  and  merciful 
laws,  made  to  help  and  guide  us  in  His  world,  is 
to  make  them  stare  at  you  as  impious. 

Yet  what  else  can  you  say  of  the  charges 
made  against  our  Father  in  Heaven  by  religious 
people  ?  I  pray  to  submit  to  God's  will,  says  the 
repentant  debauchee  in  whose  bones  the  sins  of 
his  youth  are  burning.  It  is  God's  will,  says  the 
repentant  and  reformed  drunkard  when  he  pays, 
with  shattered  nerves  and  half  sodden  brain,  the 
penalty  of  the  inexorable  law.  It  is  God's  will 
but  not  in  the  sense  these  mean  it.  It  is  His 
will  as  expressed  in  the  natural  laws  of  the  human 
body,  which  is  His  own  quite  as  much  as  the  hu- 
man soul! 

Are  all  the  diseases  men  have  brought  upon 
themselves  by  self-indulgence,,  by  folly  and  by  sin, 
— and  they  are  the  vast  body  of  diseases  under 
which  men  suffer, — are  these  things  against  or  ac- 
cording to  God's  will?  Why  He  has  warned  at 
every  step.  His  laws  have  put  lighthouses  on 
every  headland,  buoys  on  every  shoal.  If  you 
come  to  wreck,  it  is  not  for  want  of  warning.  If 
a  man  cast  himself  from  the  pinnacle  even  of  the 
temple,  down  the  sheer  precipice,  four  hundred 
feet  to  the  rocks  below,  has  God  broken  him  to 
a  shapeless  mass  or  has  he  destroyed  himself  ? 


214  ^^^  /-^^F   OF    THE    CASE. 

If  the  captain,  in  spite  of  all  beacons,  and  all 
charts  and  observations,  will  persist  in  driving 
his  ship  into  the  teeth  of  a  rocky  shore,  is  the 
Almighty  responsible,  or  is  the  captain,  for  the 
bubbling  cries  of  an  hundred  of  His  creatures 
sinking  to  darkness  through  the  foam  ?  Am  I,  in 
such  case,  to  say  "  God's  will  be  done,"  and  lay  it 
all  on  Him,  when  wife  or  children  shrieked,  un- 
heard, for  life,  to  the  cruel  sea  and  the  pitiless 
sky  ?  Is  it  mine  to  think  the  Almighty  should 
have  seized  the  ship  and  in  spite  of  steam  and 
steering  have  driven  her  the  other  way  ? 

In  cases  like  these  we  are  not  so  blind.  The 
great  crises,  occurring  rarely,  throw  a  light  too 
large  to  allow  our  delusion.  But  in  the  common 
cases  the  best  of  us  are  apt  to  live  in  a  haze  and 
to  resent  the  light,  even  be  offended  with  those 
who  bring  it,  declaring  sometimes  that  they  are 
irreverent,  or  irreligious. 

A  man  cannot,  let  me  say  with  all  reverence, 
and  in  the  name  of  religion,  be  a  glutton  and 
then  blame  His  Maker  for  his  dyspepsia ;  I  do  not 
know  that  he  can  devour  hot  biscuits  of  the  sal- 
eratus  type  with  fried  pig  (a  viand  long  ago 
condemned  by  God  and  Nature)  and  have  any 
right  to  make  the  same  blame. 

If  he  tt'/// drink  excessively,  is  it  a  just  expec- 


THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  215 

tation  that  the  Ahnighty  will  see  that  he  does 
not  have  the  gout?  If  he  insists  on  working 
night  and  day,  and  carrying  the  figures  of  his 
ledger  and  the  details  of  his  bargains  to  bed  with 
him,  even  into  church  with  him  on  Sundays,  run- 
ning over  them  when  he  has  his  prayer  book  be- 
fore him,  has  he  any  reasonable  ground  for  con- 
fidence ;  can  he  make  it  a  subject  of  prayer,  that 
he  shall  not,  some  day,  have  a  stroke  of  paralysis, 
or  find  softening  of  the  brain,  or  the  more  desir- 
able end — an  effectual  stroke  of  apoplexy  ?  Have  , 
we  the  right  to  look  on  these  results  and  piously 
accept  them,  as  things  God  pleased  to  send,  but 
which  He  might  just  as  well  not  have  sent  if  He 
had  a  mind  ? 

A  city  is  smitten  by  pestilence.  Prayers  are 
offered  that  God  would  check  or  remove  the  ter- 
rible visitation.  They  are  sometimes  publicly 
ordered.  Almost  always  they  express  themselves 
that  the  pestilence  is  a  visitation  of  His  hand, 
and  a  deserved  punishment  of  the  people's  sin. 
And  so  it  is,  if  they  understand  the  matter  rightly. 
The  pestilence  is  an  outcome  of  their  pre- 
sumptuous sin  and  its  inevitable  punishment. 
The  sin  is  the  breach  of  God's  laws  of  health,  and 
generally  the  high-handed  breach. 

There   are   foul    gutters,    reeking   alleys,    bad 


2i6  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 

water,  overcrowded  tenement  houses,  filthy 
streets.  Every  plainest  law  of  sanitary  conditions 
is  trampled  upon.  And  this  is  done  in  greed  or 
selfishness.  Each  man  thinks  he  may  allow  this 
and  escape.  Whether  his  neighbor  escape  or 
not  is  of  no  concern  to  him. 

And  when  the  result  comes,  and  death  stalks 
the  streets,  is  the  remedy  found  in  prayer  ? 
Yes,  if  you  understand  that  prayer  means  not 
only  words  said  but  works  done.  In  this  case, 
genuine  repentance  and  effectual  prayer  are  not 
had  in  the  church  but  in  the  streets,  the  manual 
of  efTective  devotion  is  not  a  Prayer  Book  but  a 
shovel  and  a  broom,  and  if  we  have  a  high  ritual 
which  requires  incense,  carbolic  acid  and  chloride 
of  lime  should  be  chosen. 

Yes,  in  such  a  visitation  let  the  people  see  the 
hand  of  Him  who  rules  all  His  worlds  by  Law, 
let  them  throng  the  churches  and  confess  their 
infractions  of  His  Law  in  their  blind  selfishness 
and  stupid  greed,  and  ask  Him  to  have  mercy 
upon  them  and  then  make  their  prayer  a  real 
prayer  by  going  out,  all  hands,  into  the  stricken 
city,  and  at  any  cost  of  money  and  labor  clean 
it  up  and  wash  it  out,  and  so  mend  their  evil 
ways  and  live. 

Let  them   never  dream   that  the  pestilence  is 


THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  217 

any  capricious  visitor  or  that  God  will  arbitrarily 
save  them  from  the  results  of  their  own  presump- 
tuous sin.  And  let  them  not  lay  upon  Him  the 
blame  for  desolate  homes  and  crowded  grave- 
yards. 

Nay,  the  temptation  upon  the  Temple  pinnacle 
is,  like  all  the  others,  a  universal  temptation.  It 
takes  different  forms,  but  its  essence  is  still  the 
same,  and  men  yield  to  it  to-day,  and  cast  them- 
selves down  as  they  have  ever  done,  in  the  pre- 
sumptuous trust  that  the  Almighty,  for  their 
sakes,  will  suspend  arbitrarily  His  own  wise 
methods. 

Our  increased  enlightenment  does  not  prevent 
the  existence  of  such  a  fanaticism  as  calls  itself 
Faith  Cure  or  Christian  Science.  In  some  form 
or  other  such  delusions  have  continually  ex- 
isted. The  theory  at  the  bottom  is  always  the 
Devil's  misquotation.  The  means  may  be  de- 
spised. For  certain  inducements,  extraordinary 
faith,  extraordinary  acts  of  piety,  the  Ruler  of 
all  things  will  suspend  the  operation  of  His 
orderly  working,  and  produce  effects  without 
causes,  cures  without  remedy,  and  deliver  from 
the  results  of  his  own  action  the  man  who  has 
found  the  secret  of  persuading  Him ! 

The  miseries  and  degradations  of  the  world. 


2i8  THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE. 

which  result  from  men's  ignorance  of  the  laws  by 
which  only  an  ordered  and  rational  human  life 
can  be  lived  on  earth,  are  terrible  enough.  But 
those  which  result  from  direct  defiance  and  con- 
tempt of  those  laws,  under  the  motives  of  greed 
and  covetousness — from  sheer  laziness  and  im- 
becility or  from  presumptuous  contempt  of  them, 
are  vastly  more  and  more  terrible. 

In  both  cases  religion  has  been  taken  to  be  a 
plan  of  deliverance,  and  a  promise  of  deliverance 
from  the  natural  and  orderly  consequences  of  our 
own  ignorance,  folly,  or  presumption. 

A  papal  Bull  against  the  Comet  is  the  expres- 
sion of  a  very  common  mental  attitude  among 
religious  people. 

And  seeing  the  absurdity  of  that  attitude,  the 
irrational  folly  of  swallowing  half  an  ounce  of 
strychnine  and  then  expecting  to  get  well  by  a 
prayer,  so-called,  believing  as  all  about  them 
compels  them  to  do,  as  every  further  step  in 
knowledge  of  natural  order  is  giving  us  more 
reason  to  believe  in  the  fixedness,  sacredness, 
and  solemnity  of  that  order,  in  the  reasonable- 
ness and  goodness  of  that  order,  is  it  surprising 
that  the  naturalists  should  have  little  reverence 
in  their  speech  for  such  religion? 

Having  Faith  a  man  may  remove  mountains. 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   CASE  2x9 

But  what  do  you  mean  by  Faith  ?  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  mountains  have  been  removed,  moun- 
tains of  difficulty  of  all  sorts,  and  even  literal 
mountains  of  rocks  and  earth  from  the  paths  of 
men.  But  never,  surely,  by  a  Faith  which  can 
embody  itself,  satisfy  its  whole  necessity,  in  any 
most  eloquent  form  of  words. 

The  good  old  lady  in  Vermont,  I  believe, 
whose  view  out  of  her  chamber  window  was 
stopped  by  the  rocky  hill  in  face  of  it,  determined 
to  test  the  promise  to  Faith,  according  to  her 
lights.  She  prayed  all  night  most  fervently  (and 
she  was  a  very  religious  woman,  according  to  the 
measure  of  religion  which  reigns  in  that  part  of 
our  country  among  her  class),  and  when  the  dawn 
came,  upon  looking  out  of  the  window  and  find- 
ing the  provoking  hill  still  there,  she  exclaimed 
in  disgust,  "  Yes!  there  you  are  still,  just  as  I 
expected !  " 

But  one  day  an  engineer  came  along  with  his 
instruments  and  chain  bearers,  examined  the  hill 
very  thoroughly,  measured  it  accurately  and  ex- 
pressed his  settled  faith  that  it  could  be  removed. 
For  the  hill  was  in  other  people's  way  as  well  as 
in  that  of  our  good  lady — this  time  in  the  way  of 
a  new  railroad. 

The   engineers'   report   was   accepted   by   the 


220  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 

company  and  his  faith  adopted  for  their  own,  and 
in  a  few  months'  time  the  hill  was  effectually  re- 
moved and  that  by  faith,  only  this  faith  was  a 
practical  and  saving  faith  and  did  not  confine  its 
expression  to  words.  Also,  after  a  few  weeks  of 
vigorous  expression,  that  faith  would  have  been 
very  much  astonished  to  find  the  hill  declining  to 
get  out  of  its  way!  Genuine  faith  finds  its  an- 
swer coming  from  the  moment  it  sets  itself  to 
praying  after  its  own  method. 

I  remember  once  in  a  Church  Council  when 
the  Missionary  Treasury  was  in  serious  stress — 
not  means  enough  to  meet  existing  obligations, 
and  new  calls  coming  continually  for  advance 
into  new  and  promising  fields,  after  some  debate 
upon  the  situation,  a  most  religious  proposition 
was  offered  by  a  very  devout  gentleman  as  a 
solution  of  the  difficulty,  this,  namely,  that  a 
special  day  of  Prayer  to  Almighty  God  should 
be  appointed  in  this  behalf,  and  all  the  people 
should  be  exhorted  earnestly  to  appeal  to  Him 
to  help  His  Church  in  the  extremity. 

I  believe  the  proposition  did  not  pass.  It  was 
felt,  if  I  remember  rightly,  that  there  was  no 
good  excuse  for  laying  this  burden  upon  the 
Lord,  especially  as  there  were  three  or  four  gen- 
tlemen present  at  the  consultation,  any  one  of 


THE  LAW  OF   THE  CASE.  221 

whom,  like  him  who  made  the  proposal,  could 
then  and  there  have  drawn  his  check  for  four  or 
five  times  the  deficiency  and  have  been  as  little 
conscious,  financially,  of  the  act,  as  when  he 
paid  his  monthly  grocer's  bill ! 

In  the  years  past,  when  nature  seemed  to  hu- 
man ignorance  a  lawless  and  devouring  monster, 
when  there  were  terrors  in  the  fields,  and  evil 
spirits  in  the  woods,  and  fierce  powers  in  the 
mountains;  when  the  winds  and  the  thunders 
were  the  sweeping  and  bellowing  of  demons  in 
the  air;  when  man  was  the  helpless  sport  and 
prey  of  frightful  forces,  the  victim  of  causeless 
disease,  misery,  and  death  ;  when  meteors  scared 
the  world  with  terror,  and  nations  grew  pale  with 
fear  in  an  eclipse, — against  all  these  things  there 
seemed  only  the  defence  of  prayer,  and  that  in 
the  narrow  meaning  in  which  they  defined  Prayer, 
in  which,  by  delusion  of  heredity,  even  such  an 
able  man  as  Prof.  John  Tyndall  still  to  this  day 
understands  it,  that  is,  a  form  of  sacred  words, 
reverently  meant  and  uttered. 

Then  also  Nature  and  God  seemed  to  stand 
opposed.  Nature  was,  in  large  degree,  man's 
enemy.  She  was  always  "  casting  him  down." 
God  must  give  and  did  give  His  angels  charge,  or 
he  would  be  again  and  again  dashed  in  pieces. 


222  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 

God  alone  by  His  direct  interference  could  save 
him  from  the  cruel,  irrational,  bestial  or  diabolic 
powers  about  him. 

And  so  men  prayed  against  natural  forces.  It 
was  one  of  the  advantages  of  religion  that  it  gave 
a  shield  against  the  results  of  natural  processes, 
and,  as  men  thought,  suspended  natural  law. 

So  men  in  filthy  cities,  reeking  with  unheard-of 
abominations,  prayed  against  "  the  Black  Death. ' 
It  was  the  only  remedy  they  knew,  the  only  form 
in  which  they  could  put  a  prayer,  a  Miserere,  or 
a  Mass.  It  was  much  that  they  believed  in  a 
good  God  still,  and  that  the  awful  visitation  was 
brought  on  by  their  own  unworthiness.  Still 
remained  the  central  fact  and  power  of  Christ 
among  them,  and  from  the  light  on  the  dying 
face  of  Calvary  they  read,  in  the  dread  face  of 
the  Awful  Death,  that  God  is  merciful  and  man 
a  sinner,  and  cried  to  Heaven  and  not  to  Hell  (as 
many  millons  of  men  in  like  case  have  done)  for 
deliverance. 

So  in  many  a  monastery  and  church,  along 
the  coasts  of  Europe,  swelled  the  wail  of  the 
Litany  with  the  added  petition  of  the  Ninth 
Century. 

Libera  nos  ira  Nonnanorum  ! 

From  heathen   powers,  cruel  and  accursed  as 


THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  223 

from  the  mysterious  Death  of  the  Black  Plague, 
let  us  be  thankful  that  they  prayed  to  God.  It 
was  a  blessed  thing  that,  in  the  darkest  time,  they 
still  believed  God  could  rule  the  world,  that  the 
Supreme  Power  of  the  Universe  was  good  and 
not  evil,  and  could  hear  and  sometimes  did  hear 
the  cries  of  suffering  men. 

And  now  the  darkness  has  somewhat  fled  away. 
Increasing  knowledge  has  driven  out  the  night 
fears  and  the  terrors  of  our  fathers'  ignorance. 
We  have  found  how  we  can  handle  and  use  many 
forces  and  processes  in  nature.  It  has  come  to 
us  that  our  condition  depends,  in  vaster  degree 
than  our  predecessors  dreamed,  upon  things  in 
our  own  power.  Not  only  our  well-being  here- 
after, but  our  well-being  here  is  in  our  hands 
greatly. 

And  so  comes  a  certain  reaction.  We  are  dis- 
posed to  consider  what  is  technically  called 
Prayer  to  be  a  power  for  that  other  world  but 
useless  here.  A  growing  notion,  commonly  ex- 
pressed, is  that  God  has  nothing  to  do  with  mat- 
ters upon  the  earth;  that  He  has  left  us  to  get 
on,  as  we  can  or  may,  with  things  here,  by  our 
own  skill  or  force,  and  that  He  confines  His  in- 
terest in  us  and  care  over  us  entirely  to  our  rela- 
tions to  the  other  world,  of  whose  laws  and  pro- 


224 


THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 


cesses  we  are  still  as  ignorant  as  men  used  to  be 
of  the  laws  and  processes  of  this. 

So  "science,"  so  called,  and  "  religion,"  so  called, 
drifting  apart,  are  leaving  us  just  where  men 
were  in  the  darkest  day. 

The  notion  thoi  was  that  the  world  was  largely 
and  hopelessly  in  the  power  of  Evil;  that  the 
masses  of  men  were  naturally  in  the  world,  in 
remediless  sorrow  and  misery;  that  God,  only 
now  and  then,  when  compelled  by  words  or  ritual 
of  power,  might  be  induced  to  interfere.  But 
still  men  had  a  hope.  God  was  supreme  in  an- 
other world.  He  would  there  carry  out  His  full 
purpose,  enjoy  His  heart's  desire.  The  bad  and 
the  accursed  devil's  brood  would  be  put  down, 
and  to  reward  for  sorrow  in  this  life,  the  good 
man  would  be  given  joy  in  that  life  to  come. 

Who  dares  to  sneer  at  this  ?  How  would  the 
men  of  many  a  century  in  Europe,  our  kindred, 
our  fathers,  have  borne  the  hopeless  darkness  of 
a  world  given  over,  as  it  seemed,  to  the  Devil, 
become  a  kind  of  vestibule  and  outer  court  of 
hell  in  its  hatred  and  cruelty  and  tyrannous 
trampling  on  the  bodies,  lives,  and  souls  of  men  ; 
how  would  they  have  endured  through  all,  sur- 
vived and  won  out  into  such  light  as  they  have 
gained    for   us   without    the    Faith  —  that   some- 


THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 


225 


where  there  was  a  better  life  than  this;  that  they 
could  endure  a  Devil's  world  for  a  few  short 
years  in  the  hope  of  a  God's  world  yet  to  come ; 
could  bear  vva'ong  for  a  year,  in  vision  of  eternal 
right  forever  ? 

If  our  fathers*  religion  took  many  a  crude  ex- . 
pression  as  it  seems  to  us  to-day,  if  it  took  even 
many  a  fierce  expression,  and  only  saw  God 
clothed  with  the  lightning  and  speaking  in  the 
thunder  of  a  just  wrath  against  the  strong  and 
merciless  evil-doers  of  the  earth,  let  no  man  con- 
demn, still  less  let  no  man  speak  of  them  in  shal- 
low folly  or  chattering  contempt. 

The  wilderness  was  very  wild  and  bare  in  which 
they  found  themselves.  Savage  brutes  cried  from 
the  rocks  and  poisonous  creatures  crawled  in  the 
sands.  The  brazen,  blistering  sky  was  above 
them.  All  things  seemed  to  declare  the  Devil's 
,  lie  a  truth,  and  that  this  world  was  his  own. 
Other  peoples  accepted  the  lie,  and  some  too  of 
"  the  noble  people,"  the  Aryan  race,  overborne  by 
the  pitiless  forces  of  nature  and  by  evil  men,  sur- 
rendered the  old  inheritance  of  their  ancestors 
and  turned  to  the  service  of  evil  gods,  because 
they  were  evil,  and,  as  evil,  owned  life  and  time. 
Our  fathers  in  the  darkest  day  never  faltered. 

They  had  been  given  to  see  the  fair  face  of  the 
15 


2  26  THE  LAW  OF    THE   CASE. 

Man  in  the  Wilderness,  full  of  pity  and  goodness, 
but  full,  too,  of  the  mighty  Power  of  both.  They 
believed  in  Him,  and  clung  to  Him  through  all, 
and  in  the  darkest  hour  despaired  not  of  the  final 
victory  of  goodness  upon  the  earth,  and  through 
the  blackness  of  every  lightning-riven,  storm- 
rended  sky,  saw  the  eyes  that  wept  at  Lazarus's 
tomb,  and  looked  pity  in  their  dying,  pity  and 
forgiveness  ere  they  closed  upon  the  bloody 
cross ! 

If  they  divided  this  world  from  the  other,  if 
they  confined  religion  to  the  invisible,  they  did 
only  what  some  of  our  Naturalists  are  asserting 
we  must  do  to-day;  what  some  even  of  our  re- 
ligious people  who  are  trying  to  "  reconcile 
Science  and  Religion  "  are  ready  to  do  also,  in 
the  hope  that  triumphant  Science  may  leave  them 
a  place  for  religion  still. 

As  between  the  two  ways  of  doing  this,  if  it 
must  be  done,  I  confess  frankly  my  choice  of  the 
elder  way.  It  led  to  the  development  of  many 
a  type  of  manhood  of  stern  and  heroic  mould. 
The  grand  names  of  the  Christian  past,  the  names 
that  ring  yet  like  the  peal  of  trumpets  in  every 
generous  soul,  fought  their  brave  fights  and 
grandly  won  or  grandly  fell  on  noble  fields  of 
high  endeavor,  because   they  were  sure  a   good 


THE   LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  227 

God  reigned  somewhere,  and  that  on  some  grand 
day  He  would  say  "  well  done  "  to  any  man  who 
had  done  his  duty  faithfully  in  His  fear.  What 
sort  of  character  will  be  produced  among  men 
should  they  accept  the  belief  that  neither  on 
earth  nor  in  any  heaven  is  there  any  God — good, 
bad,  or  indifferent — to  care  whether  a  man  is  hero 
or  coward,  liar  or  true,  knight  or  knave,  only  a 
huge  brute  "  Power  behind  Phenomena,"  without 
brains  and  without  heart,  whose  sole  intelligible 
suggestion  is  "take  the  best  care  of  your  own 
precious  carcass  that  you  can."  What  type  that 
belief  will  produce  remains  yet  to  be  seen! 

It  is  to  be  hoped  it  will  always  so  remain !  The 
guess  of  what  it  might  be  from  the  slight  sug- 
gestions of  history  is  quite  enough  to  make  one 
pray  that  prayer  with  all  his  power.  A  world 
turned  into  one  vast  swine-pasture  would  not  be 
a  very  lovely  world,  I  think,  even  should  the 
swiiie  be  of  the  best  developed  and  improved  im- 
ported breeds,  taught  with  care  to  walk  upon 
their  hind  legs,  even  to  utter  articulate  grunts. 

But  there  is  no  compulsion  upon  us  to  choose 
between  the  two  views.  They  are  both  half 
truths  and  therefore  false. 

The  Law  of  the  situation  is  plainly  laid  down 
by  the  Lord  in  Humanity's  trial.     "Cast  thyself 


228  THE  LAW  OF    THE    CASE. 

down,"  is  the  temptation.  Being  God's  Son,  He 
will  see  thee  safe  in  all  danger.  The  material 
world  in  which  thou  art  for  a  day  is  nothing  to 
Him  who  inherits  the  Eternities.  "Cast  thyself 
down :  for  it  is  written.  He  .shall  give  His  angels 
charge  concerning  thee." 

The  Lord  flings  up  the  shield  of  God's  word 
against  the  perversion  ;  defends  himself  as  before 
by  appealing  to  an  universal  principle. 

"  Thou  shall  not  tempt  the  Lord  thy  God." 

Tempt  Him?  How  ?  Clearly  by  calling  upon 
Him  to  preserve  you  even  in  the  breach  of  His 
law,  by  trying  Him  how  far  He  will  allow  your 
disobedience  and  yet  save  you  from  the  conse- 
quences. 

"  The  known  breach  of  His  physical  laws,  as 
we  call  them,  is  moral  disobedience?"  Yes,  that 
seems  to  be  the  case  if  we  understand  those  laws. 
"  Then  those  '  Laws  '  are  divine  ?  "  Yes  !  we  must 
surely  accept  that. 

The  two  processes  of  which  I  spoke  in  the  be- 
ginning of  the  Lecture,  the  process  of  cause  and 
effect  visible,  which  we  call  natural  law,  links  it- 
self, in  order,  to  the  process  of  cause  and  effect 
invisible,  which  we  call  supernatural  law,  and 
both  are  the  expressions  of  a  personal  will, 
orderly,  kosmical.  just,  and  good. 


THE   LAW  OF    THE    CASE.  229 

We  know  but  very  little  of  the  divine  processes 
even  on  the  earth.  A  few  of  them,  which  concern 
our  lowest  animal  life  from  day  to  day,  are  forced 
upon  our  attention.  We  find  out  quite  early  that 
fire  will  burn  and  that  ice  is  cold;  that  it  is  dark 
when  the  sun  goes  down,  and  remains  dark  till 
he  rises  again. 

A  few  others  we  have  learned  by  patient  study 
and  close  examination,  and  the  labor  and  study 
of  many  men.  We  have  learned  enough  to  know 
that  the  processes  are  all  orderly,  have  each  a 
beginning,  middle,  and  end,  and  can  be  depended 
upon ;  that  is,  that  they  are  the  expression  of  an 
intelligence,  and  an  intelligence  like  our  own,  be- 
cause our  own  can  see  and  appreciate  order  and 
meaning  and  purpose,  and  fitness  to  the  purpose, 
in  many  of  the  processes,  and  thence  have  the 
right,  indeed  have  an  intellectual  compulsion 
upon  us  to  conclude  they  exist  in  all. 

But,  after  all,  we  know  very  little.  The  circle 
of  our  knowledge  compared  with  the  circle  of 
our  ignorance  is  like  the  little  ring  of  light  sur- 
rounding a  candle  in  a  pitchy  night.  We  take 
up  no  line  of  these  processes  that  we  do  not  find 
ourselves  at  last,  and  generally  very  shortly, 
plunged  into  the  dark.  Our  words  at  the  best 
are  inadequate  and  we  use  them  half  blindly,  and 


230  THE   LAW  OF    THE    CASE. 

tangle  ourselves  up  in  them  in  confusion;  one 
of  the  most  common  and  tyrannous  delusions 
about  them  being  that  we  take  them  for  things. 

Only  the  other  day,  for  instance,  I  read  some 
reasoning  by  an  exceedingly  bright-minded  and 
very  thoughtful  man,  who  was  explaining  how 
we  are  quite  ignorant  of  some  kinds  of  force,  but 
,that  we  are  quite  familiar  with  the  force  of  gravity, 
having  gotten  a  mathematical  expression  for  that. 

Here  were  two  words  imposing  upon  him  for 
things.  Force  is  a  mere  word  for  certain  phe- 
nomena. And  our  intellectual  necessities  compel 
us  to  believe  that  whatever  is  at  the  base  of  these 
phenomena,  must  be  at  the  base  of  all;  that  is, 
that  whatever  our  word  Force  stands  for  it  must 
be  one  Thing  or  one  Person.  There  can  be  no 
such  thing  as  different  and  many  forces. 

Again,  the  only  mathematical  formula  con- 
nected with  what  we  call  the  Force  of  Gravity  is 
a  statement  of  how  the  Force  works.  We  are  as 
ingorant  of  what  the  Force  of  Gravity  is  as  if 
Newton  had  never  seen  the  apple  fall.  His  ma- 
thematical formula  is  not,  as  our  friend  seems  to 
think,  a  little  glass  box  into  which  Newton  put 
the  Force  of  Gravity  to  examine  it  at  his  leisure, 
and  in  which  he  left  it  stuck  fast  on  his  formula, 
like  a  beetle  on  a  pin! 


THE  LAW  OF   THE    CASE.  231 

The  Force  of  Gravity,  I  need  scarcely  remind 
you,  is  only  an  expression  for  a  phenomenon  of 
whose  cause  we  are  in  utter  ignorance,  and  New- 
ton's formula  only  a  mathematical  statement  of 
the  way  it  works. 

Now,  because  we  know  so  little  is  one  of  the 
reasons  why  many  of  us  have  so  little  regard  for 
the  elaborate  guesses  and  imaginative  theories  of 
"  Scientists,"  We  decline  to  call  those  theories 
and  guesses  Philosophy.  We  reserve  that  noble 
and  consecrated  word  for  a  quite  different  line 
of  thinking,  and  we  enter  our  very  respectful,  but 
entirely  abiding  and  quite  unalterable  protest 
against  calling  the  authors  of  such  guesses  Phil- 
osophers. It  would  be  a  degradation  of  an  im- 
perial word  such  as  all  scholars  should  denounce. 

But  little  as  we  know  of  the  processes  of  the 
one  First  Cause  even  in  this  world,  we  know 
enough  to  say  that  it  is  supreme  in  all  worlds, 
and  in  all  possible  conditions  of  life,  and  that 
granted  that  man  is  the  Son  of  God  he  is  still,  in 
this  world,  bound  to  reverence  and  obey  the 
Father's  will  as  revealed  on  Earth. 

The  use  then  of  all  means,  the  obedience  to  all 
conditions,  the  submission  to  all  restraints  of  the 
"  Laws  of  Nature,"  is  bounden  upon  the  Son  of 
God  in  the  Wilderness. 


232  THE  LAW  OF   THE   CASE. 

The  study  and  further  understanding  of  those 
processes,  the  reverent  questioning  of  all  things 
which  can  teach  us  concerning  them,  the  use  of 
all  lights  which  illumine  the  dark,  is  a  duty  the 
Son  owes  to  Him  who  placed  Him  here. 

It  is  clear  that,  instead  of  teaching  the  safety 
of  ignorance,  instead  of  suggesting  that  religion 
should  shun  the  knoAvledge  of  the  material,  that 
it  should  flee  from  Science  in  fear,  or  ban  it  as 
evil,  our  Lord  teaches  here  the  exact  reverse. 

"All  these  earthly  things,"  He  seems  to  say, 
"  are  God's  and  are  sacred.  One  must  tempt 
Him  by  no  misuse.  His  methods  here  are  good 
and  blessed.  The  processes  of  His  visible  action 
wise  and  worthy."  There  is  a  certain  sacredness 
about  what  we  call  Natural  Law  then.  Nature, 
as  we  call  the  material,  is  reverenced,  and  to  be 
questioned  in  a  spirit,  humble  and  teachable. 

So  is  man  safe  in  this  lower  realm,  as  he  obeys 
with  this  lower  obedience.  He  discovers  that 
hosts  of  evils  which  oppress  him  are  due  to  ignor- 
ance of  God's  ways  in  Nature  or  to  breach  of 
those  ways.  He  is  right  in  believing  that  he  can 
escape  only  by  knowledge  and  obedience. 

But  he  can  surely  ask  Him,  Who  Avorks  by  these 
laws,  to  enlighten  his  own  mind,  to  see  and 
strengthen  his  own  will  to  obey?     A  person  can 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   CASE.  233 

understand  a  person,  a  will  another  will,  an  intel- 
ligence another  intelligence.  The  Power,  the 
Force,  in  all  things,  is  a  Person.  Revelation  tells 
him  so.  Philosophy  leads  him  to  that  conclusion, 
and  not  one  fact  in  Science  stands  in  the  way  of 
the  conclusion ;  indeed  all  seem  rather  to  de- 
mand it,  though  some  of  its  disciples  prefer  to 
write  "  I  do  not  know,"  over  the  doors  of  their 
libraries. 

And  reverently  studying  these  lower  ways, 
faithfully  trying  to  know  them  and  obey  them, 
the  man  who  believes  himself  a  Son  of  God,  led 
up  into  the  Wilderness  to  be  tried,  finds  the  basis 
of  a  rational,  trustful,  and  safe  human  life. 

He  is  in  the  arms  of  Law,  being  in  the  arms  of 
his  Father.  Order  above,  in  the  Heavens,  order 
below  on  the  Earth.  Law,  beautiful  and  terrible 
as  an  armed  Archangel,  guards  his  going  out 
and  coming  in.  He  is  on  its  side  by  birthright. 
He  too  is  come  to  extend  the  realm  of  Law,  to 
work  with  it,  to  reduce  disorders  to  its  obedience 
and  the  wild  chaotic  things  of  Earth  to  ration- 
ality and  service  to  God  and  man.  And  he  gets 
his  training  here  in  these  low  things  himself  to 
obedience,  and  thence  to  command.  He  serves 
that  he  may  reign. 

And    all    the   time    he  can   pray.     It   is    most 


234  ^^-^  -^^^^^  OF   THE   CASE. 

rational  and  natural  that  he  should.  He,  the  Son 
of  God — the  son  of  law,  the  child  of  light  and 
order,  a  birth  of  the  dawn  here  in  the  world  that 
is  yet  a  wilderness,  where  so  many  things  are 
dark,  so  many  things  disordered  to  appearance, 
where  tempting  voices  are  round  him  to  mislead. 
Shall  he  not  stand  by  Law  as  by  his  life,  and  shall 
he  not  in  his  distress  cry  to  Him  who  is  the  source 
and  fountain  and  executor  of  Law,  high,  low, 
visible,  invisible,  law  in  the  sprouting  of  an  acorn  ; 
law  in  the  ordering  of  a  constellation ;  law  in 
the  service  of  the  intelligences  vast  and  fair  that 
stand  about  His  throne, — shall  he  not  cry  to  Him 
to  hold  him  up  and  lead  him  right  and  teach  him 
more  and  save  him,  while  he,  too,  tries  in  his  small 
place  to  serve,  to  reverence,  and  to  obey  ? 

And  shall  any  man  dare  to  tell  him  that  since 
all  powers  are  at  last  one  Power,  and  all  laws  at 
last  one  Law,  still  his  grasp  on  law  here  is  not 
grasp  on  law  yonder,  and  that  the  thrill  of  his 
need,  at  one  end  of  the  chain  of  law  on  earth,  is 
not  felt,  and  its  message  carried  to  its  ending  in 
the  Throne  of  God  ? 


LECTURE  VII. 

THE  END. 


' '  Then  the  Devil  leaveth  Hitn,  and  behold  A  ngels  came   and 
ministered  nnto  JIi?n." 


LECTURE   VII. 
THE    END. 


U 


THE 
Hi 


HE  angels  came  and  ministered  unto 
im." 

Tlie  Son  of  God  on  earth  is  in  touch  with  the 
Spiritual  Powers  both  good  and  bad!  He  has 
just  ceased  his  contact  with  the  one  and  imme- 
diately enters  into  contact  with  the  other. 

The  true  ground  has  been  taken  and  held 
throughout,  and  now,  as  the  bad  disappears,  as 
the  dark  goes  away,  the  light  and  the  goodness 
come  round  Him  and  stand  by  Him,  minister  to 
Him,  help  Him. 

And,  observe,  that  the  angels  do  not  take  the 
Son  of  God  out  of  the  world  after  he  has  had 
His  discipline.  They  still  leave  Him  where  He 
is.  He  is  yet  in  the  wilderness.  All  His  work 
is  to  come.  He  has  only  been  trained  for  that 
work;  they  come  to  aid  Him  now  after  His 
struggle,  but  all  that  He  has  to  do  lies  before 
Him  yet  undone. 


238  THE   END. 

He  has  just  been  preparing  for  it.  It  stands 
yet,  a  very  bitter  and  hard  sort  of  work.  It  is 
hard  and  bitter  for  the  Eternal  Son  of  God,  hard 
and  bitter  for  every  one  that  shares  His  humanity. 

But  let  no  man  dream  that  when  the  victory  is 
won  he  has  won  it  of  himself,  or  that  it  is  won  at 
all  to  the  last  hour  of  the  struggle,  or  that  he  is 
then  any  more  than  prepared  to  enter  upon  an- 
other contest.  Christ  was  never  again  personally 
tempted.  He  had  won  once  for  all.  We  wrestle 
our  lives  through ! 

Now  here  is  another  sharp  contrast  to  the 
theory  that  Man  is  a  product  of  the  world,  a  de- 
velopment from  any  of  its  powers.  He  is  evi- 
dently a  stranger  introduced  into  it  and  trained 
in  it  for  some  good  purpose.  No  product  of  it, 
but  put  into  it  from  the  outside,  a  power  from 
without.  He  has  entered  into  special  relations 
with  it  and  it  with  Him,  and  it  is  evident  that 
these  relations  have  been  entered  upon  because 
there  was  some  special  work  for  him  to  do  upon  it. 

Now,  if  we  ask  what  that  special  work  in  his 
case  is,  we  may  be  answered  that  it  is  but  the  de- 
liverance of  his  own  soul  out  of  it.  But,  mani- 
festly, that  must  be  a  very  incomplete  answer,  for 
if  that  be  all,  why  was  he  ever  tangled  up  in  it.'' 

If  he  has  nothing  to  do  with  it  except  to  get 


THE  END. 


239 


out  of  it,  why  was  he  ever  put  into  it  at  all  ? 
Clearly  we  must  find  some  other  purpose  for  his 
being  in  the  world  than  this. 

If  there  be  two  worlds,  a  material  and  a  spirit- 
ual, if  they  stand  in  any  way  related,  there  must 
be,  when  we  finally  examine,  a  link,  a  point  of 
connection  somewhere  that  joins  the  one  to  the 
other,  that  partakes  of  both  worlds  and  stands  in 
both.  Naturalists  are  very  busy  finding  links  be- 
tween different  kinds  of  animals,  links  that  seem 
to  share  the  nature  of  two  species,  two  forms  of 
life,  so  as  to  easily  pass  over  breaks  in  organiza- 
tion. Suppose  we  admit  that  it  must  be  always 
so,  that  there  is  a  regular  step  up  and  on,  must 
the  height  not  be  reached  when,  if  there  be  an 
invisible  world  admitted  at  all,  there  must  be  a 
connecticn  in  nature  not  only  with  that  but  with 
the  visible.  And,  if  that  be  so,  then  there  is  no 
other  being  but  man  that  can  stand  for  that  con- 
necting link.  If  you  reach  development  up  to 
that  point  you  can  only  stop  with  a  being  that  is 
prepared  to  touch  one  world  with  one  hand  and 
the  other  world  with  the  other,  and  if  he  be  such 
and  so  constructed  he  must  have  things  to  do  in 
either  world. 

Now  we,  as  Christian  people,  take  it  there  is 
an   invisible  world,  a  spiritual   world.     We  hold 


2  40  THE  END. 

ourselves  to  be  scientific  in  saying  so;  we  believe 
ourselves  thoroughly  supported,  not  only  by 
revelation  but  by  all  the  analogies.  We  know 
that  the  power  behind  the  visible  world  is  invisi- 
ble, that  behind  the  phenomena  is  the  Power  that 
makes  pJicnoniena. 

Suppose  God  wants  to  "  save  "—as  we  call  it — 
the  lower  world,  suppose  he  wants  to  elevate  the 
visible  world,  deliver  it  from  darkness,  free  it  from 
chaos  and  disorder,  how  shall  He  do  it  ?  Sup- 
pose there  be  a  power  personal  that  can  do  it  at 
all,  how  shall  he  do  it  ?  The  strange  thing  is 
that  apparently  He  cannot  do  it  by  purely  spirit- 
ual beings! 

And  yet  this  is  natural  and  reasonable.  The 
spiritual  must  be  clothed  with  the  material  to 
touch  the  material,  to  handle  it,  to  deal  with  it. 
So  we  say,  reverently,  that  God  cannot  save  men 
without  becoming  a  man!  Here  is  the  strangest 
necessity  in  "  the  scheme  of  salvation  "  as  worked 
out  by  theologians.  There  can  be  no  salvation 
until  God  becomes  man! 

This  is  the  story  familiar  to  us  from  childhood, 
taught  us  in  our  catechisms,  the  story  of  the  in- 
carnation, of  the  Second  Person  of  the  Trinity 
becoming  Human.  God,  to  save  the  world,  puts 
His  Son  into  the  world,  and  thereby  adopts  the 


THE  END.  241 

whole  race  of  men  and  gives  them  under  Him 
this  world  to  save.  So  this  strange  being,  Man, 
touches  both  the  Eternal  and  the  temporal,  lives 
in  both. 

Our  Lord  stood  in  the  wilderness  for  universal 
humanity.  Now  look  at  the  relations  that  follow. 
We  reach  here  the  spiritual  nature  and  the  phy- 
sical consciousness  of  man. 

I  don't  know  how  else  you  can  explain  the 
visions  that  come  to  him  of  a  land  that  never  was 
on  any  earthly  shore,  of  fairer  scenes  than  ever 
lay  under  any  sunlight  or  moonlight  here,  of 
statelier  cities  than  ever  towered  aloft  in  any 
clime,  if  we  have  not  in  such  the  vision  of  "  the 
spiritual  city,"  whose  walls  and  towers  are  never 
builded  by  mortal  builders,  where  all  things  are 
pure  and  fair,  grand  and  holy,  where  all  is  light 
and  all  is  divine.  If  we  have  not  had  such 
visions  we  are  strange  products  of  a  Christian 
land  in  this  century! 

I  believe  we  all  have  them.  It  is  a  sort  of  in- 
nate vision  and  dream  in  men,  this  of  the  Spiritual 
City;  St.  John  describes  it  in  the  Revelation  as 
the  new  Jerusalem,  coming  down  from  Heaven 
to  Earth,  a  place  walled  in  from  sin  and  shame, 
whence  all  that  is  foul  and  false  has  been  swept 

away  and  all  that  is  good  and  pure  and  sweet  is 
16 


242  THE  END. 

preserved  forever,  a  place  where  all  light  shines 
and  all  darkness  has  fled  away.  There  is  that  in 
us  which  compels  the  seeking  to  build  upon  the 
earth  a  shadow  at  least  of  God's  high  City.  We 
say  it  exists  in  "  the  land  that  is  very  far  off." 
Some  day  we  hope  to  attain  it.  But  we  cannot 
be  content  with  that ;  we  must  strive  to  make 
shadows  of  it  here,  on  the  earth  ;  must  try  here  to 
make  things  something  like  heaven 

The  impulse  of  our  destiny  is  upon  us,  and  the 
higher  we  go  the  higher  we  reach  as  men,  we  find 
clearer  this  vision  of  the  spiritual  city,  and  also 
the  more  resolved  and  determined  we  find  the 
human  Avill  to  reproduce  it  here. 

There  is  of  course  the  other  side,  the  content- 
ment that  one  has  with  the  world,  and  we  can  be 
thankful  because  such  content  exists  amid  all  the 
sufferings  of  life ;  because  when  life  comes  to  the 
end  there  then  awaits  us  the  blessedness  in  the 
land  beyond  and  a  faith  that  we  shall  see  those 
towers  that  shine  forever,  and  those  homes  where 
we  shall  dwell  in  peace.  But,  at  the  same  time, 
one  feels  it  is  not  all  he  has  to  do,  to  get  his  own 
soul  safe  out  of  the  wilderness.  The  Avilderness 
is  dear  to  us  after  all.  Heaven,  beheld  by  faith, 
may  be  very  fair,  and  call  out,  for  its  attainment, 
the  highest  and  noblest  that  is  in  us,  but  even 


THE  END.  243 

the  hope  of  Heaven  cannot  destroy  affection  for 
the  dear  green  earth  where  we  were  born,  for 
the  world  where  we  have  lived  and  loved.  We  can 
see  in  its  mornings  and  evenings,  in  its  sapphire 
seas,  in  its  emerald  woodlands,  in  its  flashing 
streams,  in  its  descending  cataracts,  in  its  white 
morning  glows,  in  the  splendor  of  its  noontides, 
some  image  of  that  other  land  that  has  been 
promised  and  for  which  we  hope ;  we  cannot  leave 
this  in  despair. 

We  say  "  the  world  must  be  better  for  my  be- 
ing here,  I  have  my  work  to  do  in  it  and  I  must 
turn  to  that ;  I  cannot  leave  it  as  I  found  it." 

That  has  been  the  impulse  that  has  brought  us 
hither.  China  has  not  advanced  an  inch  in  all 
the  historic  period, — she  is  just  where  she  was. 
There  are  other  cases  of  absolute  stagnation.  VVe 
congratulate  ourselves  that  we  belong  to  a  race 
that  moves  on  and  up.  One  of  the  best  words 
we  have  is  "  progress."  We  believe  that  to-day 
is  responsible  for  to-morrow.  A  curious  thing 
that,  the  idea  that  we  are  responsible  for  the 
making  of  the  world  !  You  make  your  theory, 
you  tabulate  the  facts  that  belong  to  all  sorts  of 
events  in  the  world  you  try  to  make  a  "science 
of  sociology  "  out  of  them.  When  you  have  done 
all  you  have  not  told  a  single  secret  of  the  move- 


244  ^^^  END. 

ment.  You  may  mark  the  advance  and  the  re- 
trogression, the  eddy  and  the  swirl,  where  things 
stop  an  instant  and  then  sweep  forward,  and  all 
this  may  be  very  valuable.  To  have  this  laid 
down  for  you  and  to  have  the  facts  grouped  to- 
gether where  they  belong,  kind  for  kind,  may  be 
of  use,  but  when  you  have  that  done  where  is 
the  force  that  produced  it  all  ?  There  must  be 
a  force,  where  does  it  lie  ?  When  you  examine 
you  will  find  it  a  personal  force  in  very  large  de- 
gree. The  final  force  is  always  personal.  You 
finally  reach  a  race  that  believes  itself  responsible 
for  the  condition  of  things  about  it. 

No  man  believes  in  a  sociology  without  men. 
The  consciousness  of  every  one  of  us  holds  us 
responsible,  each  in  his  degree,  for  the  conduct  of 
the  world.  You  say,  "  I  am  responsible  for  my 
community  in  my  degree,  for  my  land  in  my  de- 
gree, responsible  for  the  ideas  that  reign  in  it,  for 
the  way  it  is  going.  I  am  bound  to  lift  up  my 
voice  and  protest  against  the  wrongs  if  I  believe 
there  are  any.  I  am  bound  to  give  my  voice  for 
right  things,  bound  to  see  that  they  are  right. 
The  whole  body  of  us  is  bound  to  do  the  same. 
If  some  great  evil  grows  to  large  headway  in  the 
next  generation  the  men  of  this  generation  are 
under  obligation   and  are  guilty  of   the   result. 


THE  END.  245 

They  should  have  seen  it,  they  should  have  pre- 
vented it."  What  becomes  of  the  theory  of  non- 
personality  in  the  Universe,  of  no  spiritual  Mas- 
ter in  the  organization,  and  the  movement  of  hu- 
man life,  of  society,  and  the  nations  of  the  world, 
when  men  themselves  turn  round  and  say,  "  we 
hold  ourselves  responsible;  we  need  not  have  had 
these  things  so;  we  condemn  ourselves  for  per- 
mitting them."  Count  our  murders.  We  ought 
not  to  have  them.  There  is  no  necessity  that 
they  should  exist.  We  can  lower  them  to  a 
minimum,  can  prevent  them,  we  believe,  alto- 
gether. There  is  no  use  in  having  pestilence  and 
famine.     We  are  responsible  for  both. 

You  look  back  again  ;  you  find  that  all  great 
movements,  all  that  make  eras,  have  some  man 
or  men  for  their  authors.  These  did  not  come 
without  changes,  and  changes  produced  by  a 
personal  will.  We  may  say,  if  Christopher  Co- 
lumbus  had  not  discovered  America  somebody 
else  would  have  done  it.  Yes,  but  not  then,  and 
all  the  argument  gathers  around  the  fact  that  it 
was  discovered  then,  just  when  the  best  time  had 
come  for  its  discovery,  when  Europe  was  prepared 
to  make  the  best  America.  You  cannot  argue 
that  away.  Columbus  created  an  era,  that  is  all. 
Luther  made  an  era.     Men  may  blame  or  praise 


246  THE  END. 

the  results  of  the  era  as  they  see  fit,  but  that  the 
era  was  made  by  a  man,  and  by  one  man  and  by 
one  man's  personality  and  one  man's  will,  so  that 
that  personality  and  that  will  are  stamped  upon 
the  world  for  all  time,  is  the  clearest  fact  of 
modern  history. 

Jails  were  in  a  very  bad  state  and  men  might 
have  possibly  mended  the  jail  condition,  but 
would  they  have  mended  them,  or  would  the 
condition  be  to-day  as  it  is  if  Howard  had  never 
lived  and  travelled  and  visited  jails  and  never  died 
for  the  cause  he  took  in  hand  ? 

The  slave  trade  might  have  ended,  but  I  take 
it  no  man  can  tell  the  story  of  its  ending  without 
naming  William  Wilberforce  and  understanding 
that  there  a  personal  will,  a  personal  power,  a 
man's  love  of  man  changed  the  face  of  the  world, 
the  conditions  of  sociology,  the  position  of  men 
upon  the  earth.  You  that  read  history  can  take 
scores  of  cases,  which  I  need  not  go  over,  that 
come  to  your  mind  spontaneously  where  men 
have,  by  their  personal  will,  the  force  of  their  in- 
dividuality, changed  the  whole  course  of  the 
stream  of  time. 

There  has  been  injected  into  the  world's  move- 
ment, moving  under  regular  cause  and  effect  of 
course,  a  personal  element  which  has  transformed 


THE  END.  247 

and  changed,  and  you  have  to  make  your  account 
with  that. 

So  it  is  perfectly  right  to  say  we  put  our  trust 
not  only  in  God  but  also  in  man.  *'  Ye  believe 
in  God,  believe  also  in  Me,"  said  Christ.  The 
one  Man  of  all  men,  the  Son  of  God,  appointed 
to  carry  out  God's  purpose,  to  do  God's  will 
spiritual  and  material,  carries  out  perfectly  and 
to  the  utmost  the  intentions  of  the  Infinite  Will. 
We  have  these  millions  of  finite  wills  of  other 
men,  and  they  are  right  and  do  their  work  exactly, 
as  they  work  in  accordance  with  that  other  Will. 
So  God  and  man  work  together.  The  weakest 
man,  working  upon  His  side,  is  a  majority! 

And  now  in  our  looking  at  the  days  to  come, 
we  start  from  this  basis  that  will  carry  us  through, 
and  enable  us  to  do  the  work  logically  and  con- 
sistently. We  start,  as  sons  of  God,  as  delegated 
spiritual  powers  on  the  earth  to  set  things  right. 
It  is  the  ingrained  conviction  of  our  people,  per- 
haps of  all  the  foremost  peoples,  and  especially 
of  the  foremost  men  among  those  peoples,  that 
they  are  to  set  things  right;  that  they  are  respon- 
sible for  things.  The  problems  of  the  coming 
time  face  us  and  we  them.  We  say  we  cannot 
leave  this  world  as  the  abiding  place  of  Satan. 
We  propose  that  the  angels  shall  come  down  and 


248  THE  END. 

minister  to  the  sons  of  God,  and  taking  that  stand 
we  cast  away  the  blind  and  weak  theory  of  the 
production  of  things  from  themselves  as  if  all 
things  were  a  chain  of  names  without  cause  and 
without  power,  and  take  the  ground  that  the 
world  can  be  mended,  and  that  it  must  be  mended 
by  personal  wills ! 

And  then  when  we  look  at  things  with  which 
we  have  to  deal,  we  ask  ourselves  are  any  of 
them  sacred  from  our  hands?  Is  a  special  form 
of  government  sacred  ?  Surely  not.  The  state 
is  sacred.  There  is  no  special  form  of  the  state 
that  is  so.  The  government  and  the  state  are 
two.  Have  you  reached  yet  the  highest  possible 
development  of  the  state  organization,  an  organi- 
zation to  do  justice  among  men  to  govern  wisely 
and  in  the  spirit  of  God  ?  Have  we  reached  that 
point  ?  No  state  ever  yet  approached  the  ideal. 
Our  own  has  made  an  advance,  no  doubt,  but  it 
is  very  far  away  from  the  ideal  yet.  There  is 
nothing  at  all  sacred  in  majorities.  In  fact  there 
is  sometimes  very  much  that  is  much  the  reverse 
of  sacred.  Majorities  have  a  very  bad  habit  of 
being  wrong  in  the  story  of  the  world.  We  have 
scarcely  a  possession  on  the  earth  that  men  praise 
that  was  not  at  some  time  sustained  by  a  minority, 
condemned  by  a  majority.     There  were  manifold 


THE  END. 


249 


voices  against  it,  ten  or  an  hundred  strong  voices 
which  were  the  echoes  of  the  Eternal  Voice,  were 
for  it  and  it  won.  Nor  is  the  word  "president" 
more  sacred  than  the  word  "  emperor,"  nor  the 
word  "  governor  "  than  the  word  "  king," 

These  are  matters  of  no  sort  of  consequence. 

Then  there  is  surely  nothing  sacred  in  the  de- 
tails of  our  business,  or  our  financial  systems. 
Do  not  suppose  Almighty  God  cares  much  about 
our  bank  balances  or  our  arrangements  of  capital 
and  labor,  of  finances,  of  manufacture  and  com- 
merce. These  things  have  been  meddled  with 
by  men ;  they  have  developed  by  natural  effects 
which  we  see  about  us.  Men  have  just  as  often 
muddled  them  as  improved  them.  As  they  stand 
now,  no  man  pretends  they  are  final  or  even  ven- 
erable or  respectable.  We  have  no  reverence  for 
"  the  dismal  science,"  as  if  it  were  of  any  im- 
portance in  a  decent  humanized  world. 

In  an  ideal  state  of  society  we  will  not  have  a 
great  deal  of  crime,  of  fraud,  of  poverty,  of  sick- 
ness. These  things  will  be  minimized,  will  be  re- 
duced to  the  lowest  possible  expression,  and 
finally,  in  a  perfect  state,  they  will  be  entirely 
removed.  Do  you  say  they  cannot  be  ?  If  so, 
then  I  answer,  the  Christian  Church  may  just  as 
well  close  its  doors,  because  the  Christian  Church 


250  THE  END. 

is  simply  and  solely  the  ideal  of  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  established  on  the  earth  to  leaven  the  rest. 
She  oue^ht  to  be  His  ideal  and  her  business  is  to 
bring  all  the  outside  world  to  accept  that  ideal 
and  to  be  a  part  of  it,  and  if  this  business  is  not 
going  on  then  the  church  of  God  is  good  for 
nothing  except  to  be  cast  out  and  trodden  under 
foot  of  men. 

There  is  nothing  more  offensive  to  the  nostrils 
and  to  the  taste,  I  think,  than  leaven.  You  can- 
not eat  it,  you  cannot  offer  it  to  your  God,  to 
3''our  king,  or  to  your  friend.  It  is  simply  a  rot- 
ten substance.  It  is  a  curious  thing  that  the 
Lord  should  describe  His  kingdom  under  that 
word,  that  he  should  say  "  the  kingdom  of  God  is 
like  leaven,"  an  absolutely  useless  thing  except 
as  it  works  on  other  things.  That  is  all  it  exists 
for.  Unless  the  church  of  God  on  earth  is  work- 
ing on  the  world  about  it,  remaking  that  world, 
it  is  very  clear  the  church  of  God  is  of  no  account 
whatever.  , 

Those  who  come  into  that  church  of  God,  who 
take  the  vows  upon  them,  say  they  have  seen  His 
ideal  of  Avhat  ought  to  be  in  the  church  and  in 
the  world,  and  by  the  power  and  the  grace  of 
God  they  are  going  to  go  on  and  try  to  realize 
that  ideal.     But   no    man    has    ever  attained   it. 


THE  END. 


251 


That  is  another  strange  thing  about  it,  no  man 
has  ever  kept  the  vows  of  his  baptism.  No  man 
has  ever  kept  the  vows  repeated  in  his  confirma- 
tion and  at  the  table  of  the  Lord,  and  no  man 
ever  can  keep  them.  Our  great  Christian  Poet 
has  put  it  exactly,  warning  those  who  would 
enter  the  mystic  gates  of  the  strange,  dim  city, 
"TheKine, 


Will  bind  thee  by  such  vows  as  is  a  shame 
A  man  should  not  be  bound  by,  yet  the  which 
No  man  can  keep." 

It  is  a  part  of  the  mystery  of  our  strange  life, 
the  voice  coming  from  the  spiritual  world,  telling 
what  we  ought  to  be  as  sons  of  God  and  asking 
us  to  take  the  vows.  We  take  them,  and  then 
finding  ourselves  tied  hand  and  foot  in  the  ma- 
terial, allied  to  the  beasts  that  perish,  made  like 
them,  skeleton  for  skeleton,  function  for  function, 
one  stands  dismayed.  We  carjnot  keep  the  vows. 
We  can  only  climb  and  strive,  and  climbing  and 
striving  try  to  help  all  others  climb  and  strive 
beside  us. 

The  problems  that  press  upon  us  are  the  eter- 
nal problems  that  have  faced  men  in  social  life 
from  the  first. 

I  dare  to  say  that  no  man  ought  to  be  com- 
pelled to  live  in  any  Christian  land  a  life  that  is 


252 


THE  END. 


not  human.  That  he  should  have  all  the  oppor- 
tunities to  live  such  a  life;  that  our-arrangements 
of  circumstances,  of  leisure,  of  occupation,  should 
be  such  as  compel  no  man  to  be  a  mere  toiling 
beast.  That  has  been  the  lot  of  the  great  body 
of  men  in  all  past  time.  It  is  coming  to  us  surely 
in  these  later  days  to  see  that  it  is  not  longer  the 
human  lot.  Labor,  hard  labor,  is  divine.  God 
has  blessed  it  and  man  has  honored  it,  but  the 
labor  of  the  dumb  beast,  of  the  ox  in  the  yoke, 
of  the  mule  at  the  plough,  that  is  not  divine  labor. 
If  the  man  who  holds  the  plough  handles  behind 
the  ox  or  mule  only  toils  as  they  do  for  to-day's 
rations  and  the  night's  brute  rest  you  have  bru- 
talized the  man.  Labor  has  brutalized  him ;  it 
has  dragged  him  down  among  the  beasts ;  it  is  not 
the  labor  of  a  Son  of  God. 

This  will  have  to  be  changed  some  day.  I  do 
not  care  what  your  arrangements  are,  or  your 
government  or  business,  financial  or  otherwise, 
there  is  one  thing  that  is  just  as  sure  as  the  eternal 
words  of  God,  just  as  sure  as  that  the  stars  in  their 
courses  fight  on  the  side  of  eternal  right  and  eter- 
nal law ;  such  a  thing  as  that  must  go ;  it  must  go 
kindly,  sweetly,  gently,  if  it  may,  but  if  it  cannot 
go  that  way  it  will  go  some  other.     Go  it  must. 

And  then  again   I  do  not  care  what  your  ar- 


THE  END,  253 

rangements  are,  when  one  man's  mind  is  so  taken 
up,  occupied  and  exhausted,  that  he  dies  pre- 
maturely, drops  in  his  tracks  because  he  cannot 
take  care  of  the  immense  income  he  must  yearly 
reinvest;  kills  himself  in  trying  to  find  out  how 
best  to  roll  his  millions  over,  and  another  man, 
not  twenty  rods  from  him,  sits  beside  his  starving 
child  or  wife  in  a  great  Christian  city ;  be  your 
civil  and  social  arrangements  what  they  may, 
you  can  make  up  your  mind  that  is  a  condition 
that  must  be  changed,  no  matter  what  becomes 
of  such  arrangements.  In  the  crises  that  come 
when  such  things  go  as  they  must,  reverence  for 
old  conditions  does  not  stand  much  in  the  way, 
and  there  is  a  strong  tendency  in  our  time,  and 
it  is  a  happy  and  holy  tendency,  to  get  down  to 
the  facts  in  every  case,  to  be  no  more  imposed 
upon  by  venerable,  no  matter  how  venerable,  de- 
ceits, cheats,  and  pretensions. 

Need  in  the  world  for  the  common  physical 
sufferings  of  men  ?  Surely  not !  It  has  been 
naturally  arranged  for  quite  other  conditions. 
There  is  bread  enough  to  feed  all  the  hungry 
every  year  and  millions  of  loaves  to  spare.  There 
is  cloth  enough  to  cover  all  the  cold  and  naked 
and  plenty  to  spare.  The  abundance  of  the 
world  we  have  been  obtaining;  it  has  been  rolling 


254  THE  END. 

in  upon  us  in  endless  measure,  and  the  problem 
now  is  how  you  are  to  distribute  it  so  that  men 
may  live  contented  and  reasonably  human  lives 
under  all  these  gifts. 

When  a  man  has  time  to  think,  to  cultivate 
himself,  to  reason  with  himself  and  consider  his 
higher  and  better  life,  we  can  have  a  world  of 
civilized,  cultured,  intelligent,  reasonable  men. 
And  if  I  understand  the  message  of  my  own  land 
to  the  rest  of  the  world,  the  grand  revelation 
of  life  in  "  the  gigantic  Daughter  of  the  West " 
— this  is  it — "  Man  must  be  able  to  live  a  human 
life  on  earth."  It  must  come,  and  it  must  come 
here  before  it  comes  anywhere.  Charged  with 
intelligence,  with  leadership,  with  freedom  from 
all  the  old  fetters  of  bondage,  intellectual  and 
spiritual,  shall  not  the  children  she  holds  in  her 
mighty  arms  settle  the  questions  of  the  ages  ? 
They  cannot  do  it  as  drifting  expressions  of  the 
world's  forces,  themselves  products  of  blind 
chance. 

And  now,  after  all,  what  practical  connection 
does  all  this  suggest  with  the  world  unseen  and 
the  spiritual  city  ?  Can  we  get  any  help  from 
angels  or  God  in  our  earthly  endeavors  ?  If  so, 
how  is  it  gotten  ?  Is  there  any  use  in  pray- 
ing, any  answer  to  prayer  ?    If  I  have  not  settled 


THE  END.  255 

that  I  do  not  know  how  I  am  going  to  settle  it 
or  give  you  any  farther  word  to  help  you. 

I  have  been  considering  man  on  the  earth  as 
God's  spiritual  messenger  to  redeem  the  earth, 
the  weakest  of  us,  the  smallest  of  us,  as  having  a 
part  and  duty  in  the  work.  We  are  personalities, 
the  originators  of  movements,  and  those  move- 
ments aflect  others.  Now,  being  persons  and 
being  sons  and  citizens,  too,  of  the  spiritual  city 
we  are  allied  to  Almighty  God ;  we  are  in  daily 
communication  with  him;  we,  and  we  alone,  so 
far  as  weknow,  on  the  earth,  can  send  our  voices 
to  His  seat,  and  therefore  the  infinite  powers  of 
heaven  are  in  conjunction  with  men.  We,  our- 
selves, effect  things  and  God  effects  things.  What 
we  call  the  development  and  chain  of  events 
about  us  is  only  the  regular  action  of  God's  will 
and  of  our  own  will,  and  therefore  God  can  hear 
the  prayer  of  God's  children  and  God  can  answer 
the  prayer;  the  true  expression  of  the  relation- 
ship between  these  two  is  prayer  and  the  answer 
to  prayer. 

I  say  only  human  voices  can  go  from  earth  to 
heaven,  and  man  only  can  have  that  voice  an- 
swered. Men,  persons,  and  efficient  wills,  are 
bound  therefore  to  the  throne  of  God,  the  infinite 
Personality,  the  infinite  Will.     And  more,  if  our 


256  .  THE  END. 

faith  be  true  that  on  the  circle  of  the  heavens  and 
on  the  throne  of  God  a  Man  is  sitting,  a  human 
nature,  will,  and  personality,  the  Lord  and  Mas- 
ter of  this  world  and  of  all  worlds,  then  I  think  a 
man  can  speak  to  a  Man  and  the  Man  will  hear 
him.  But  that  man  is  his  brother!  Any  word 
of  need  from  the  lost  and  wretched,  any  cry 
of  human  want  passes  through  the  shining 
ranks  of  all  the  angels,  into  the  very  inmost  au- 
dience-hall and  presence-chamber  of  the  Al- 
mighty, a  man's  voice  in  his  need,  his  own  need 
or  his  brother's,  and  the  voice  shall  be  answered. 

You  ask  how  ?  Can  God  answer  prayer  ?  Can 
he  change  His  own  action,  "suspend"  His  own 
"  laws  ?  "  Is  the  Almighty  tied  up  as  you  and 
I  are  not  tied,  by  the  uniformity  of  His  own  pro- 
cedure ?  He  is  then  in  worse  case  than  the  poor 
Persian  king  in  Babylon — chained  hand  and  foot 
by  his  own  law  so  that  much  as  he  desired  it  he 
could  not  save  Daniel ! 

You  and  I  never  break  natural  law,  as  we  call  it, 
but  we  handle  it,  we  use  it,  we  turn  it  to  wise  ac- 
count ;  we  seem  to  change  it  or  suspend  it  for  our 
own  good  or  the  good  of  others  and  do  no  harm ! 
God  Almighty  knows  far  more  about  His  own 
action,  about  the  way  He  manages  and  handles 
His  own   creation   than   you   or  I   do.     Do  you 


THE  END.  257 

suppose  He  is  a  slave  to  it  ?  Is  He  not  as  free 
in  it  as  one  of  ourselves  ?  Do  you  not  see  the 
whole  supposed  difficulty  is  a  blunder  about  a 
word  taken  for  a  thing  !  But  one  thing  is  sure, 
the  pulse  that  beats  between  the  Son  of  God  and 
God  Himself,  between  the  Eternal  Personality 
invisible,  and  the  poor  little  needy  persons  here 
on  the  earth  sent  for  a  special  purpose  and  to  do 
a  special  work,  that  close  clinging  of  want  and 
supply  must  be  so  close,  so  intimate,  that  no  one 
thrill  of  human  need  can  come  but  it  must  touch 
the  will  of  God  vibrating  along  the  unseen  line 
between  these  two.  Man's  attitude  on  the  earth 
while  doing  God's  will  is  our  Lord's  attitude. 
On  the  spiritual  side  of  his  nature  he  lives  among 
the  everlasting  facts,  and  handles  the  Eternal 
powers  that  make  phenomena.  To  deny  God's 
power  to  answer  the  prayers  of  His  children  is 
to  make  the  Eternal  God  th6  slave  of  the  pheno- 
mena ! 

I  spoke  about  our  race  as  being  of  all  men  the 
race  that  hopes.  It  seems  you  cannot  break  us 
down.  You  cannot  make  this  people  take  on  de- 
spair. You  may  call  them  rash.  That  may  be 
their  fault.  But  never  do  they  give  up  hope  of 
the  good  day  coming.  Fair  to-morrows  are  com- 
ing to  us  and  to  all  men. 
17 


258  THE  END. 

We  look  for  victory.  There  is  but  the  one 
way  to  triumph.  The  land  is  our  Father's.  It 
is  ours  because  we  are  His  sons.  We  will  defend 
our  own.  We  ask  only  our  own,  but  in  God's 
great  name  we  will  insist  upon  our  Father's  land 
for  our  Father's  children. 

A  Kingdom  of  the  Sons  of  God!  We  have 
made,  in  these  last  days,  no  more  modest  a  proc- 
lamation than  that !  It  was  made  three  centuries 
ago  with  a  narrow  and  even  foolish  meaning. 
We  make  it  now  in  the  light  of  a  broader  day 
and  a  loftier  vision.  A  land  of  justice  and  of 
right,  a  land  of  truth  and  loyalty,  a  land  of  sweet, 
fair  homes  of  purity  and  peace;  a  land  where 
honest  wages  come  to  honest  work ;  a  land  where 
manhood  holds  its  old  reverence — it  is  the  image 
of  God! 

All  the  weary  march  can  surely  not  be  for 
nothing!  All  the  blood,  the  toil,  the  tears,  the 
starving  of  the  wilderness,  cannot  fail.  We  have 
struggled  on  toward  Sun-Setting  so  far  that  our 
waiting  eyes  see  at  last  Sun-Rising! 

The  Earth  shall  hang  luminous  in  the  smile  of 
God.  Angels  shall  minister  in  a  world  where 
men  say  to  the  Sensual  and  the  Dark — in  the 
Name  of  our  Father,  ^'get  thee  behind  me,  Satan  !  " 


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keenest,  clearest,  and  most  convincing  arguments  ever  put  forth  for 
popular  use." — Christian  Stuvdard. 

"  Dr.  Stearns  is  able,  witty,  patient  and  conclusive." — South- 
western Presbyterian. 

"  He  follows  the  Archbishop,  chapter  by  chapter,  tearing  the 
gauze  from  his  concealed  falsehoods,  and  cutting  him  to  pieces  at 
every  point." — The  Central  Baptist, 

''  We  hail  with  joy  this  opportune  reply  to  a  work  that  has  had 
sway  for  about  two  years  without  meeting  refutation  and  rebuke,  and 
hope  it  will  meet  with  as  hearty  a  reception  from  people  as  well 
as  press.  It  meets  every  doctrine  and  dogma  of  the  Church  of 
Rome,  and  robs  it  of  its  boasting.''—  The  Methodiit  (New  York). 

"  The  Rev.  Dr.  Stearns,  of  the  diocese  of  Ea^ton,  has  brought 
out,  through  Whittaker,  of  New  York,  publisher,  a  crushing  reply  to 
Archbishop  Gibbons'  work,  '  The  Faith  of  our  Fathers.'" — Church 
A^(?W5- (Baltimore),  Oct.  g. 

"  Our  author  has  both  the  learning  and  al)ility  to  u«e  it.  He 
can  see  the  weak  point  in  an  argument,  can  keep  his  temper,  and 
moreover  has  a  pleasant,  sometimes  a  humorous  method  of  writing. 
Hence  tins  book  is  both  able  and  interesting.  The  author  has  done 
his  work  well.  To  what  extent  the  Archbishop's  book  has  been 
circulated  among  Prote.stants  [probably  to  the  extent  of  half  the 
'  sixty-five  thousand,'  seeing  it  was  written  expressly  for  them — see 
the  opening  sentence  of  the  Introduction]  we  know  not  ;  but 
certainly  the  antidote  is  at  hand.  We  therefore  hope  our  pastors 
will  see  that  this  work  has  a  large  circulation,  and  is  just  as  impor- 
tant for  other  Protestants  a^  ourselves." — Southern  Churchman, OcX.<^. 

"Since  the  days  of  the  masters  of  English  Theology,  who 
encountered  every  Jesuit  and  other  Romish  champion  that  showed 
his  face  and  unhorsed  and  took  away  the  sword  of  every  one  whom 
they  encountered,  ihere  has  bren  no  such  sturdy,  vigorous,  indom- 
itable and  all-quelling  fighter  for  the  Catholic  truth.     Of  Archbishop 


Gil)l)ons  he  does  not  leave  so  much  as  to  be  worth  decent  burial. 
Dr.  Stearns  vindicates,  for  the  hundredth  time,  but  with  learning  and 
wit  which  has  not  been  a  hundred  times  exhibited,  that  we  represent, 
and  the  Church  of  Rome  doss  not  represent,  in  faith,  usage,  and 
worship  the  Catholic  Church  of  the  beginning;  and  so  clearly  does 
lie  see,  that  he  shows,  also,  clearly  ;  and  his  learning  is  as  easy  to 
the  average  American  reader  as  his  wit.  There  is  not,  moreover,  a 
liresome  or  dull  word  in  the  whole  book.  Let  every  lover  of  'that 
which  is  good  '  buy  this  book  and  spread  its  sale  and  reading," — 
Standard  of  Cross  {C\t\e.\a.nd),  Oct.  25. 

'•  In  these  days  of  half  faith  and  less  than  half  knowledge,  it  is 
a  tea!  comfort  to  meet  with  a  thorough,  stalwart,  earnest,  deeply 
learned  man  like  the  author  of  this  book.  Dr.  Stearns  is  most 
enipliaticaliy  not  one  of  those  wlio  find  it  hard  to  say  how  they  differ 
from  the  Church  of  Rome,  and  easy  to  say  how  they  differ  from 
Protestant  denominations  who  are  not  so  far  from  the  true  faith  as 
that  body  is.  He  is  still  more  emphatically  not  one  who,  ignorant 
and  stupid  hatred  of  Popery,  accepts  mere  Protestantism  as  the  true 
faith  and  practice,  and  blindly  suspects  and  disowns  what  is 
Catholic.  Archbishop  Gibbons'  book  Dr.  Stearns  positively  cuts  to 
shreds,  showing  the  worthlessness  and  paltriness  of  every  claim  and 
pretence  of  which  it  is  made  up.  And  how  he  does  it !  See  what 
work  he  makes  of  St  Peier's  'supremacy'!  See  the  clear  and 
indisputable  account  of  the  British  Church,  ages  before  the  Mission- 
ary St.  Aui^ustine  from  Rome  !  But,  indeed,  see  ihe  whole  book  ; 
buy  it,  and  gtt  it  read." —  The  Living  Church  (Chicago),  Nov.  6. 

"Dr.  Stearns  has  most  thoroughly  accomplished  his  purpose. 
He  follows  the  Archbishop  chapter  by  chapter  and  mercilessly  drives 
him  to  the  wall.  We  have  1, n  jwn  something  in  past  days  of  Roman 
controversialists,  but  anythng  more  coolly  audacious  than  some  of 
the  statements  and  '  arguments '  which  Dr.  Stearns  exposes  we 
have  never  seen.  He  literally  pulls  the  Archbishop  to  pieces.  And 
this  is  done  in  a  racy,  pleasant  style,  full  of  wit  and  humor,  such  as 
might  be  expected  from  the  author  of  '  The  Af tei  piece  to  the  Comedy 
of  Convocation.'  In  conclusion,  we  might  caution  our  readers 
against  supposing  that  this  book  of  Dr.  Stearns  is  useful  and 
interesting  only  as  an  examination  of  Archbishop  Gibbons.  It  is  a 
valuable  Theological  Manual.  It  will  be  found  extremely  service- 
table  by  any  clergyman,  however  well  furnished  he  may  be  on  these 
importf'.nt  subjects.  This  volume  will  be  a  helpful  guide  to  any 
'layman  also  who  may  chance  to  be  perplexed  in  the  mazes  of  the 
Roman  question." — The  Churchman,  Nov.  15. 

*,*  Copies  mailed  postpaid  upon  receipt  0/  price. 

THOMAS  WHITTAKER,  2  and  3  Bible  Honse, 

NEW  YORK. 


Christianity  in  D^I  fondnct. 

Studies  of  Texts  relating  to  Principles  of  the  Christian  Character. 

Crown  octavo,  338  pages,  neat  cloth  binding.      Price  f  I.50, 


"  It  is  one  of  those  books,  of  which  we  have  too  few,  which  can  be 
read  and  re-read  with  growing  interest  and  satisfaction  and  always  with 
renewed  instruction  and  profit." — Christian  At  Work. 

"  It  seems  a  pity  that  a  book  containing  such  decided  opinions  on 
many  questions  should  not  have  the  endorsement  of  the  writer's  name." — 
Publisher  s  Weekly. 

"  This  i-i  a  volume  of  exceptional  excellence.  The  author  of  these 
twenty-two  sermons  should  have  not  concealed  his  personality  The 
style  is  lucid,  tlie  argument  strong,  the  purpose  direct,  the  spiritual  uplift 
continuous.  The  thoughts  are  very  rich,  and  there  is  nothing  slipshod  in 
their  arrangement.  The  topics  are  selected  by  a  master-spirit,  who 
knows  what  man  needs  and  how  to  supply  his  need.  Many  a  vol- 
ume of  sermons  announced  with  flourish  of  trumpets  ad  supported 
by  illustrious  names  ontains  less  ihan  ihis.  It  is  in  the  conduct  of  daily 
life  that  Chris  iamtv  declares  itself,  and  ihe  wise  adaption  of  precept  and 
parable  to  the  minute  duties  of  each  day  shows  not  only  the  skill  of  the 
writer,  but  the  breailih  and  beauty  (.f  Christian  truth.  Humility,  for- 
giveness, anger,  purity,  lyini,',  giving,  heavenly  citizenship,  the. one  talent, 
the  Elder  Brother,  are  all  treated  with  a  calm  spirit,  and  a  clear  appre- 
hension of  the  t'u-e  Christian  doctrine.  Ii  is  a  plensure  to  read  these 
pages,  free  from  he  restless  drive  of  an  excited  passion.  The  author  can 
afford  to  give  his  name  in  the  next  edition,  and  furnish  more  sermons  for 
publication." — Christian   Union. 

"  It  is  a  b  )ok  a  layman  mi^ht  have  written,  and  which  it  will  do 
good  for  a  layman  to  read.  For  our  own  part,  reading  between  the  lines, 
we  incline  to  the  clerical  oii^in,  and  we  do  not  believe  we  shoi.M  have  to 
go  far  from  a  prominent  parish  in  this  city,  to  put  our  hands  upon  its  min- 
ister and  to  say  ;  '  Thou  art  the  man.'  But  be  this  as  it  u:ay,  we  wel- 
come the  volume,  both  for  its  subject  and  treatment.  It  is  Ch  istinnity 
applied,  and  that  is  the  great  need  of  our  day.  The  libraries  are  londed 
down  with  treatises,  many  often  stupid,  on  dogma  and  doctrine;  the  clergy 
preach  about  the  ct  remonial  and  the  aesthetics  of  religion,  its  clothe-  and 
drapery,  and  wVat  men  want  to  know  about  is  its  flesh  and  blood,  its 
life." — Mail  and  Express,  N.   Y. 

***  Copies  will  be  forwarded  by  mail  or  exptess,  prepaid,  at  f  r.50. 

THOMAS  WHITTAKRR. 

2  and  3  Bible  House,  New  York. 


Princeton  Theoloqical  Seminary  Libraries 


1    1012   0 


235   7762 


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